Regular Expressions 101

1st Alternative(?:ACT|SCENE).+?\d+

Non-Capturing Group(?:ACT|SCENE)

1st AlternativeACT

ACTthe literal text ACT (case sensitive)

2nd AlternativeSCENE

SCENEthe literal text SCENE (case sensitive)

.+?any Unicode character (except for line terminators), repeated at least once

\d+a Unicode decimal digit, repeated at least once

2nd Alternative\S.*?(?=\s?(?:ACT|SCENE|$))

\Sany character that is not Unicode whitespace

.*?any Unicode character (except for line terminators), repeated any number of times

Positive Lookahead(?=\s?(?:ACT|SCENE|$))

\s?optionally matches a Unicode whitespace character

Non-Capturing Group(?:ACT|SCENE|$)

1st AlternativeACT

ACTthe literal text ACT (case sensitive)

2nd AlternativeSCENE

SCENEthe literal text SCENE (case sensitive)

3rd Alternative$

$end of line

Global pattern flags

g modifier: global. Finds all matches instead of stopping after the first

m modifier: multiline. Causes ^ and $ to match the start and end of each line, not only the start and end of the string

Detailed match information will be displayed here automatically.

Search reference

Regular Expression

(?:ACT|SCENE).+?\d+|\S.*?(?=\s?(?:ACT|SCENE|$))

New

Hi this is ACT I. SCENE 1 and SCENE 2 and this is ACT II. SCENE 1 and SCENE 2 and more