regex - multiple matches after a specific word

Question

Simplified example: consider the string aabaabaabaabaacbaabaabaabaa

I want to match all aa occurrences only after the c in the middle, using one regex expression.

The closest I've come to is c.*\Kaa but it only matches the last aa, and only the first aa with the ungreedy flag.

I'm using the regex101 website for testing.

Answer 1

You can use

(?:\G(?!^)|c).*?\Kaa

See the regex demo. Details:

• (?:\G(?!^)|c) - either the end of the previous successful match (\G(?!^)) or (|) a c char
• .*? - any zero or more chars other than line break chars, as few as possible
• \K - forget the text matched so far
• aa - an aa string.

Answer 2

Just match

aa(?!.*c)

Demo

(?!.*c) is a *negative lookahead that, after matching 'aa', 'c' does not appear later in the string.