I have the following regex expression ^.*?(?=\.) and i'm looking to modify it so that i can pull the 3 charecter country code (bold) from a given path. Right now the regex just creates a group before the period.
/path/to/folder/Conclusions_Pakistan_2019-09-13_PAK.pdf
regex101 link: https://regex101.com/r/FGjqSl/1
Your regex ^.*?(?=\.) matches everything from start until it asserts presence of . hence it matches too much.
You may just use this regex 3 character country code comprising all upper case letters:
[A-Z]{3}(?=\.)