c# - Regex to return the word before the match

Question

I've been trying to extract the word before the match. For example, I have the following sentence:

"Allatoona was a town located in extreme southeastern Bartow County, Georgia."

I want to extract the word before "Bartow".

I've tried the following regex to extract that word:

wsCounty,

What I get returned is "w County" when what I wanted is just the word Bartow.

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/65882368/regex-how-to-get-x-number-of-characters-before-a-match

Answer 1

You can use this regex with a lookahead to find word before County:

w+(?=s+County)

(?=s+County) is a positive lookahead that asserts presence of 1 or more whitespaces followed by word County ahead of current match.

RegEx Demo

If you want to avoid lookahead then you can use a capture group:

(w+)s+County

and extract captured group #1 from match result.