On Fri, 27 Jun 2008 12:21:12 -0400, Mike
wrote:

<snip

Thx.

I suspect the "meat" is in your regex scrips and/or your data, and not in what
you posted.

It may be in how you define your "small range of the following characters".

It might also have to do with typos in your data -- there are several typos in
what you've posted and, if these were copied from your data, the regex's
probably would not behave as you expect.
--ron

ron

Yeah, it's jut a quick snippet w/o the benefit of copy & paste (at 4
am). My work doesn't
allow any kind of i/o. Allow me to make some sense. I didn't see (b4
posting) that
there's a whole lot of regex activity in here!

Let's say my target string is the following: "Frodo went over to
Frodo's house and
ate Frodo's food."

What I'm searching for is every instance of 'Frodo', with a chunk of
following text to give it
some context. I'm actually looking for instances of a common term whose
meaning can be
determined by the following words. By displaying a sort of phrase the
user can quickly see if
the term is being used in the context that interests him.

The search pattern is "Frodo.{0,16}". The resultant match values are :
"Frodo went over to Fr" and
"Frodo's house and ate" and
"Frodo's food."

It works fine with an example like this. However if I have a source str
where the patterns
are close together, I 'lose' the subsequent matches. For example,
"Frodo wore Frodo's pants."
will result in a match collection size of 2, with the first value
"Frodo wore Frodo's pa", and
no second value.

The only solution I can see is to get the positions of the matches, and
extract the text using substring.

Well, the following regex, with the appropriate options set, will return all
strings that start with Frodo and end either with the next Frodo or with the
end of a line:

Frodo.*?(?=Frodo|$)

Here are the options I set:

..Global = True
..IgnoreCase = True
..MultiLine = True
..Pattern = "Frodo.*?(?=Frodo|$)"
--ron