I've read many Questions on StackOverflow, including this one, this one, and even read Rexegg's Best Trick, which is also in a question here. I found this one, which works on entire lines, but not "everything up to the bad word". None of these have helped me, so here I go:
In Javascript, I have a long regex pattern. I'm trying to match a sequence in similar sentence structures, like follows:
1 UniquePrefixA [some-token] and [some-token] want to take [some-token] to see some monkeys.
2 UniqueC [some-token] wants to take [some-token] to the store. UniqueB, [some-token] is in the pattern once more.
3 UniquePrefixA [some-token] is using [some-token] to [some-token].
Notice that each pattern starts with a unique prefix. Encountering that prefix signals the start of a pattern. If I encounter that pattern again during capture, I should not capture a second occurance, and STOP THERE. I'll have captured everything up to that prefix.
If I don't encounter the prefix later in the pattern, I need to continue matching that pattern.
I'm also using capture groups (not repeating, since Capture Groups only return the last matched of that group). The capture group contents need to be returned, so I'm using match, non-greedy.
Here's my pattern and a working example
/(?:UniquePrefixA|UniqueB|UniqueC)\s*(\[some-token\])(?:and|\s)*(\[some-token\])?(\s|[^\[\]])*(\[some-token\])? --->(\s|[^\[\]])*<--- (\[some-token\])?(\s|[^\[\]])*/i
It's basically 2 repeating patterns in a specific order:
(\s|[^\[\]])* // Basicaly .*, but excluding brackets
(\[some-token\]) // A token [some-token]
How I can prevent the match from continuing past a black list of words?
I want this to happen where I drew three arrows, for context. The equivalent of Any character, but not the contents of this list: (UniquePrefixA|UniqueB|UniqueC) (as seen in capture group 1).
It's possible I need a better understanding of negative lookahead, or if it can work with a group of things. Most importantly, I'm looking to know if a negative look-ahead approach can support a list of options Or is there a better way altogether? If the answer is "you can't do that," that's cool too.