How to create "blocks" with Regex - regex

Question

For a project of mine, I want to create 'blocks' with Regex.
\xyz\yzx //wrong format
x\12 //wrong format
12\x //wrong format
\x12\x13\x14\x00\xff\xff //correct format
When using Regex101 to test my regular expressions, I came to this result:
([\\x(0-9A-Fa-f)])/gm
This leads to an incorrect output, because
12\x
Still gets detected as a correct string, though the order is wrong, it needs to be in the order specified below, and in no other order.
backslash x 0-9A-Fa-f 0-9A-Fa-f
Can anyone explain how that works and why it works in that way? Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

To match the \, folloed with x, followed with 2 hex chars, anywhere in the string, you need to use
\\x[0-9A-Fa-f]{2}
See the regex demo
To force it match all non-overlapping occurrences, use the specific modifiers (like /g in JavaScript/Perl) or specific functions in your programming language (Regex.Matches in .NET, or preg_match_all in PHP, etc.).
The ^(?:\\x[0-9A-Fa-f]{2})+$ regex validates a whole string that consists of the patterns like above. It happens due to the ^ (start of string) and $ (end of string) anchors. Note the (?:...)+ is a non-capturing group that can repeat in the string 1 or more times (due to + quantifier).
Some Java demo:
String s = "\\x12\\x13\\x14\\x00\\xff\\xff";
// Extract valid blocks
Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile("\\\\x[0-9A-Fa-f]{2}");
Matcher matcher = pattern.matcher(s);
List<String> res = new ArrayList<>();
while (matcher.find()){
res.add(matcher.group(0));
}
System.out.println(res); // => [\x12, \x13, \x14, \x00, \xff, \xff]
// Check if a string consists of valid "blocks" only
boolean isValid = s.matches("(?i)(?:\\\\x[a-f0-9]{2})+");
System.out.println(isValid); // => true
Note that we may shorten [a-zA-Z] to [a-z] if we add a case insensitive modifier (?i) to the start of the pattern, or just use \p{Alnum} that matches any alphanumeric char in a Java regex.
The String#matches method always anchors the regex by default, we do not need the leading ^ and trailing $ anchors when using the pattern inside it.