Regex to capture string except last 2 letters in PCRE

A few questions:

• Could your string have more or less than 2 digits?
• If it's fixed to two digits, then why not just dropping the 2 last chars and not use a regular expression?
• Is it because we have to validate the input? Typically, what about "# @123"?

If you have to check that it's ending with digits, then don't use the solution (.*)..$ proposed in the comments as . matches any character and you'll get, for example, "Hel" out of "Hello". It has the same effect as just truncating your string.

I would personally be more precise and also take in consideration only words, to avoid matching something like "12345" or "!#@123".

I would suggest this:

/^(\p{L}+)\d+$/u

Explanation:

• The u flag at the end is for unicode, so that you can handle special chars, such as emojis or other special characters, not knowing what is your input text.
• With PCRE, you can use unicode character classes. This can help you match a word character in any language with \p{L}, which means Letter. It's about the same as \w but with the handling of multiple codepoint sequences.
• If the end of your string must be digits then you can use \d+. If it really has to be only 2 digits, then replace it by \d{2}.

const strings = [
  'test01',  // Ok
  'abcd02',  // Ok
  'test123', // More than 2 digits, perhaps ok also?
  'vidéo05', // Accented chars in the word, ok or not?
  '123456',  // Only digits => should it match? maybe not!
  '####03',  // Not word chars before the digits... hmm, no match.
  'Hello'    // No digits at all... no match.
];

const regex = /^(\p{L}+)\d+$/u;

strings.forEach(string => {
  const match = regex.exec(string);
  if (match) {
    console.log(`Word found in "${string}" is "${match[1]}"`);
  }
  else {
    console.log(`Does NOT match "${string}"`);
  }
});

With PCRE you'll get the same: https://regex101.com/r/bvY3dg/1

This regex worked for me:

(.*)..$

https://regex101.com/r/MF7S5A/1