BBEdit/Grep: Find character and replace everything after character

Question

I'm loosing my mind trying to figure this out with Find function in BBEdit.

Example data:

Co-founder & Head of Engineering ; 10 months

Technical Recruiter ; 1 year

Chief Technology Officer ; 3 years

The result should be:

Co-founder & Head of Engineering

Technical Recruiter

Chief Technology Officer

How do I tell BBedit to remove everything in the line after each ";"?

I've tried googling and wondered around in the documentation, but can't seem to figure it out.

Answer 1

Just saw this. There are different ways of doing it. Here is one way that is easy to follow hopefully. In the Find window choose "Grep", then type the following regex expression:

(.*);(.*)

Here, each pair of round brackets capture different part of the sentence in each line. For example:

(Co-founder & Head of Engineering) ; (10 months)

When you use parentheses in regex match, it holds the value in a capture symbol. The content of thirst () will be stored in "\1" symbol, the content of the second () will be stored in "\2", in the given order. Now that we have \1 and \2, we can put them back with "Replace", and anything not captured or not replaced will be deleted. See the attached picture.

Note: Actually you do not need second parentheses since you are not using what you capture with it. I just put it there in case you want to experiment with it by doing: \1 and \2.

I hope it helps in the future.