Regular expression captures unwanted string - regex

Question

I have created the following expression: (.NET regex engine)
((-|\+)?\w+(\^\.?\d+)?)
hello , hello^.555,hello^111, -hello,+hello, hello+, hello^.25, hello^-1212121
It works well except that :
it captures the term 'hello+' but without the '+' : this group should not be captured at all
the last term 'hello^-1212121' as 2 groups 'hello' and '-1212121' both should be ignored
The strings to capture are as follows :
word can have a + or a - before it
or word can have a ^ that is followed by a positive number (not necessarily an integer)
words are separated by commas and any number of white spaces (both not part of the capture)
A few examples of valid strings to capture :
hello^2
hello^.2
+hello
-hello
hello
EDIT
I have found the following expression which effectively captures all these terms, it's not really optimized but it just works :
([a-zA-Z]+(?= ?,))|((-|\+)[a-zA-Z]+(?=,))|([a-zA-Z]+\^\.?\d+)

Answer 1

Ok, there are some issues to tackle here:
((-|+)?\w+(\^.?\d+)?)
^ ^
The + and . should be escaped like this:
((-|\+)?\w+(\^\.?\d+)?)
Now, you'll also get -1212121 there. If your string hello is always letters, then you would change \w to [a-zA-Z]:
((-|\+)?[a-zA-Z]+(\^\.?\d+)?)
\w includes letters, numbers and underscore. So, you might want to restrict it down a bit to only letters.
And finally, to take into consideration of the completely not capturing groups, you'll have to use lookarounds. I don't know of anyway otherwise to get to the delimiters without hindering the matches:
(?<=^|,)\s*((-|\+)?[a-zA-Z]+(\^\.?\d+)?)\s*(?=,|$)
EDIT: If it cannot be something like -hello^2, and if another valid string is hello^9.8, then this one will fit better:
(?<=^|,)\s*((?:-|\+)?[a-zA-Z]+|[a-zA-Z]+\^(?:\d+)?\.?\d+)(?=\s*(?:,|$))
And lastly, if capturing the words is sufficient, we can remove the lookarounds:
([-+]?[a-zA-Z]+|[a-zA-Z]+\^(?:\d+)?\.?\d+)

Answer 2

It would be better if you first state what it is you are looking to extract.
You also don't indicate which Regular Expression engine you're using, which is important since they vary in their features, but...
Assuming you want to capture only:
words that have a leading + or -
words that have a trailing ^ followed by an optional period followed by one or more digits
and that words are sequences of one or more letters
I'd use:
([a-zA-Z]+\^\.?\d+|[-+][a-zA-Z]+)
which breaks down into:
( # start capture group
[a-zA-Z]+ # one or more letters - note \w matches numbers and underscores
\^ # literal
\.? # optional period
\d+ # one or more digits
| # OR
[+-]? # optional plus or minus
[a-zA-Z]+ # one or more letters or underscores
) # end of capture group
EDIT
To also capture plain words (without leading or trailing chars) you'll need to rearrange the regexp a little. I'd use:
([+-][a-zA-Z]+|[a-zA-Z]+\^(?:\.\d+|\d+\.\d+|\d+)|[a-zA-Z]+)
which breaks down into:
( # start capture group
[+-] # literal plus or minus
[a-zA-Z]+ # one or more letters - note \w matches numbers and underscores
| # OR
[a-zA-Z]+ # one or more letters
\^ # literal
(?: # start of non-capturing group
\. # literal period
\d+ # one or more digits
| # OR
\d+ # one or more digits
\. # literal period
\d+ # one or more digits
| # OR
\d+ # one or more digits
) # end of non-capturing group
| # OR
[a-zA-Z]+ # one or more letters
) # end of capture group
Also note that, per your updated requirements, this regexp captures both true non-negative numbers (i.e. 0, 1, 1.2, 1.23) as well as those lacking a leading digit (i.e. .1, .12)
FURTHER EDIT
This regexp will only match the following patterns delimited by commas:
word
word with leading plus or minus
word with trailing ^ followed by a positive number of the form \d+, \d+.\d+, or .\d+
([+-][A-Za-z]+|[A-Za-z]+\^(?:.\d+|\d+(?:.\d+)?)|[A-Za-z]+)(?=,|\s|$)
Please note that the useful match will appear in the first capture group, not the entire match.
So, in Javascript, you'd:
var src="hello , hello ,hello,+hello,-hello,hello+,hello-,hello^1,hello^1.0,hello^.1",
RE=/([+-][A-Za-z]+|[A-Za-z]+\^(?:\.\d+|\d+(?:\.\d+)?)|[A-Za-z]+)(?=,|\s|$)/g;
while(RE.test(src)){
console.log(RegExp.$1)
}
which produces:
hello
hello
hello
+hello
-hello
hello^1
hello^1.0
hello^.1