Non-capturing groups

Putting capturing groups within an expression is a useful way to both parse an expression and also as a form of organisation, allowing you to say that certain groups are optional or using the pipe operator to designate a choice inside a group.

You can use a non-capturing group to retain the organisational or grouping benefits but without the overhead of capturing. To write a non-capturing group, you place ?: as the first element inside the brackets:

([0-9]+)(?:st|nd|rd|th)?

This example matches either a sequence of digits, or a sequence of digits followed by one of the prefixes -st, -nd, -rd, -th (e.g. 1st, 4th). However, only the first group (the digits) is captured. The second group is non-capturing, introduced by ?: inside the brackets. Its sole purpose is to (a) limit the scope of the choice operator– |– to part of the expression, and (b) allow us to apply the ? operator to that sub-part of the expression. (Repetition operators such as ?, *, + always apply to the item immediately preceding; if we want that item to comprise various characters or elements, then we need to form a group.)

Common mistake: groups aren't optional unless you include a final ?

When you write a non-capturing group that you want to be optional, it's easy to forget the final ?. If we write the expression as follows:

([0-9]+)(?:st|nd|rd|th)

then the expression will accept any of the alternative suffixes (-st, -nd etc), but including one of the suffixes will be mandatory for the expression to match. Don't confuse the ?: placed at the start of a non-capturing group with the optionality operator ?, placed after a group or item in the expression.

Next topics

Depending on your needs, the following topics are recommended next:

• named character classes which are a kind of shortcut for certain common character classes;
• String splitting (tokenisation) with regular expressions;
• performing search and replace operations with regular expressions;
• multi-line regular expressions, in which we discuss the options to set to specify how you want to deal with line breaks in matched strings.