Regex: Select everything on each line, after the first 2 letters of the beginning, but up to the dash

Question

I have several many lines like this:

af - miracle asfsa
am - facut asfa
az - ali baba asfa
be - strong asas
ty - asfa asfsa
...

I want to select/delete all from lines after the first 2 letters. I made a regex, but it keep the space before the first 2 letters. I need to exclude also that space.

SEARCH: ^.?\w\W{1}.*?

The expected result should be:

af
am
az
be
ty
...

Answer 1

• Ctrl+H
• Find what: ^\w\w\K.+$
• Replace with: LEAVE EMPTY
• CHECK Wrap around
• CHECK Regular expression
• UNCHECK . matches newline
• Replace all

Explanation:

^           # beginning of line
    \w\w        # 2 word character
    \K          # forget all we have seen until this position
    .+          # 1 or more any character but newline
$           # end of line

Screenshot (before):

Screenshot (after):

Answer 2

an alternative:

• Ctrl+F
• Find what: ^[a-z]{2}\K.*$
• CHECK Wrap around
• CHECK Regular expression
• Find All in Current Document

OR

• Ctrl+F
• Find what: (?<=^.{2}).*$
• CHECK Wrap around
• CHECK Regular expression
• Find All in Current Document

Answer 3

The following sed script uses a regex to isolate the first 2 characters :

sed 's/\(..\).*/\1/'

It works as intended with your example.