RegEX text until first occurrence for character

[Sgdva]

Greetings!
As the title states, I would like how to define a pattern to make regex take the text until the first occurrence for a defined character.
IE:
The useful text is here 'this is garbage 'so is this 'and this is garbage too

I tried to define pattern as
.Pattern = ".*(?=')"

But this takes the last result as consideration, so for the example would return:
The useful text is here 'this is garbage 'so is this
I need "The useful text is here" only.
Any ideas on the pattern?

 

[JoeMo]

This is untested so beware use of "." in any pattern can have many pitfalls.

.pattern = ".*?(?= ')"

 

[Rick Rothstein]

You can more than likely do what you want without using RegExp, but it would help to know how you want to apply this (a function that returns a single result, a macro that will process an entire range, something else)?

 

[Sgdva]

This works! Thanks a lot!

 

[JoeMo]

This works! Thanks a lot!

You are welcome - thanks for the reply.

 

[Rick Rothstein]

You can more than likely do what you want without using RegExp, but it would help to know how you want to apply this (a function that returns a single result, a macro that will process an entire range, something else)?

Just to show you what I was thinking about here...

As a function applied to a single String argument...

Function BeforeApostrophe(S As String) As String
  BeforeApostrophe = Trim(Split(S, "'")(0))
End Function

As a subroutine outputting the parsed text to Column B...

[table="width: 500"]
[tr]
	[td]Sub GetTextBeforeApostrophe()
  Dim LastRow As Long
  LastRow = Cells(Rows.Count, "A").End(xlUp).Row
  Range("B1").Resize(LastRow) = Evaluate(Replace("IFERROR(IF(@="""","""",LEFT(@,FIND(""'"",@)-1)),"""")", "@", "A1:A" & LastRow))
End Sub[/td]
[/tr]
[/table]

 

[Sgdva]

You can more than likely do what you want without using RegExp, but it would help to know how you want to apply this (a function that returns a single result, a macro that will process an entire range, something else)?

Through some coding, I narrowed a string from vba with that format (code lines with comments) but, there may be 'comment 'additional comment, etc and I only need to evaluate the real code.

Just to show you what I was thinking about here...

As a function applied to a single String argument...

Function BeforeApostrophe(S As String) As String
  BeforeApostrophe = Trim(Split(S, "'")(0))
End Function

As a subroutine outputting the parsed text to Column B...

[TABLE="width: 500"]
<tbody>[TR]
[TD]Sub GetTextBeforeApostrophe()
  Dim LastRow As Long
  LastRow = Cells(Rows.Count, "A").End(xlUp).Row
  Range("B1").Resize(LastRow) = Evaluate(Replace("IFERROR(IF(@="""","""",LEFT(@,FIND(""'"",@)-1)),"""")", "@", "A1:A" & LastRow))
End Sub[/TD]
[/TR]
</tbody>[/TABLE]

Yeah, that may be an approach, but, using the first function, wouldn't be faster with regex using a test and if so then execute?
(I'm not quite sure if the difference is even noticeable, but, I wanted to try regex, though, yeah, this does what I want too).

Using regex function may be like follows

Function BeforeChr(iChr As String, iText as String) As String
Dim Regex as Object
   Set Regex = CreateObject("VBScript.RegExp")
    With Regex 
    .Pattern = ".*?(?= " & iChr  & ")"
    End With
   If Regex .Test(iText) Then
   BeforeChr= Regex .Execute(iText )(0)
   Else
   BeforeChr = iText
   End if
   Set Regex = Nothing
End Function

 

[shg]

RegEx is the slowest function in the world.

You could also use

if instr(strInp, "'") then strOut = left(strInput, instr(strInp, "'") - 1 else strOut = strInp

 

[Sgdva]

Oh! I didn't know that about regex! -Though, yeah, there are some scenarios that I really need to use it or I would be using left, right, mid so much and complicated!-
At the end, I used Rick solution Mini Quote: Trim(Split(S, "'")(0)) , since it handles no "'" in the string too.

 

[LockeGarmin]

RegEx is the slowest function in the world.

While I certainly agree that Regex is slower and the non-Regex solutions proposed are better suited for this task, I disagree and would state that Regex really isn't that much slower then native VBA string functions. I just ran a couple of tests and the Non-Regex Methods could do this task 100,000 times in .18 seconds while the Regex Method could do it in .80 seconds (it should be noted the Regex object was only created once). Again, I'm glad to see the OP is using a non-Regex approach to solve his issue. Simple code is generally better code.