Regex in Airtable is so frustrating. Help with string.

[Stephen_Joslyn]

I wish Airtable Regular expressions followed some common flavours so we could test it with regex101.com

I can make it work in these builders, but then when it comes back to Airtble #ERRROR. It's a huge potential but otherwise Airtable makes it hard to figure out why it isn't working.

I am trying to pull out the Patient's name from a Text extract. It always occurs after "Patient's name: " & before "Birthdate:"

Example string:
Radiology Report Patient’s name: Barney (57493) Birthdate: 7/5/2013 

One Regex101.com, and regextester.com I can get it perfectly with this regex:
(?<=name: )(.*)(?= Birthdate: )

But when I put that in airtable:

REGEX_EXTRACT({PDF Text Extraction}, "/(?<=name: )(.*)(?= Birthdate: )")

I get a big fat #ERROR

I know it's me but can anyone point me int he direction of a regex tester that is compatible with Airtable?
Or tell me what I can use here?

[Matthew_Lanni]

This should do the trick, I think: REGEX_EXTRACT({PDF Text Extraction}, "Patient's name: (.*?) Birthdate:")

As for testing, I find that Google Sheets gives far better error messages and uses the same syntax (as far as I've seen), so that's what I use to figure it out before putting it into Airtable.

[kuovonne]

Airtable REGEX formula functions are based on Google's RE2 library, which does not support the before/after features you are trying to use, among other things. It is the same library that Google Sheets uses.

If you stick to "simpler" regex expressions you should be okay.