Regular expression for first 4 characters - regex

I need a regular expression for 4 characters. The first 3 characters must be a number and the last 1 must be a letter or a digit.
I formed this one, but it not working
^([0-9]{3}+(([a-zA-Z]*)|([0-9]*)))?$
Some valid matches: 889A, 777B, 8883

I need a regular expression for first 3 will be a number and the last 1 will be a alphabet or digit
This regex should work:
^[0-9]{3}[a-zA-Z0-9]$
This assumes string is only 4 characters in length. If that is not the case remove end of line anchor $ and use:
^[0-9]{3}[a-zA-Z0-9]

Try this
This will match it anywhere.
\d{3}[a-zA-Z0-9]
This will match only beginning of a string
^\d{3}[a-zA-Z0-9]
You can also try this website: http://gskinner.com/RegExr/
It makes it very easy to create and test your regex.

Just take the stars out...
^([0-9]{3}+(([a-zA-Z])|([0-9])))?$
The stars mean zero or more of something before it. You are already using an or (|) so you want to match exactly one of the class, or one of the other, not zero or more of the class, or zero or more of the other.
Of course, it can be simplified further:
^\d{3}[a-zA-Z\d]$
Which literally means... three digits, followed by a character from either lowercase or uppercase a-z or any digit.

Related

Regex string contains at least one character

I have a special code which is always 7 characters. The first 3 character must always contain a letter [A-Za-z].
Ex: 12**A**5667 or **A**2156903 OR 2**A**14312
I know I can do it with ^\d{2}[A-Za-z]\d{4}|[A-Za-z]\d{2}\d{4}|\d[A-Za-z]\d{5}$
but is there a way that I can simplify this code with look-ahead function or something?
You could find useful something like this:
\d{0,2}[A-Za-z]\d{4,6}
And then to check if the length is your expected length
Try this:
^(?=\d{0,2}[A-Za-z])[\dA-Za-z]{3}\d{4}$
It uses a lookahead to ensure that there is a letter at most two digits away from the start. Then, it starts the line again and it checks that it has 3 digits or letters at the beginning followed by 4 digits.

regex few blocks exact length

I want to match 5 to 20 character with regex.
I try to use below regular expression for my checking.
/^[a-zA-Z][\w]{5,20}$/
It's work, but the problem of length it match 6 to 21 character.
(^[a-zA-Z][\w]){4,20}$
I also try this but it don't work.
Please anyone help me to match exact length of regex.
It's because your capturing group is expecting TWO characters:
[a-zA-Z] and [\w], that's two letters.
So your first attempt actually did this:
match [a-zA-Z] once
match [\w] once
match the previous matches 5 - 20 times
Inevitably, you always had 1 more match than expected
Capture only one character, and iterate it 5-20 times.
Have you tried:
^([a-zA-Z]{5,20})$ ?
OR
^(\w{5,20})$ ?
You're almost there, you just need to make a single range of characters (in square brackets) not two.
/^[a-zA-Z][\w]{5,20}$/ means:
a character from a to z in lower or upper case
5 to 20 word characters
That sums up to 6 to 21 characters in total.
I suppose you want /^[a-zA-Z][\w]{4,19}$/:
a character from a to z in lower or upper case
4 to 19 word characters
That sums up to 5 to 20 characters in total.
The Quantifier is only applied to the [\w]. So this expects exactly one letter character and then 5-20 whitespace characters.
I assume you want 5-20 characters that can be either a letter a-z or a whitespace. You need to group these together in square brackets and then apply the quantifier:
^[a-zA-Z\W]{5,20}$
So, I understand, you want a string that has 5-20 characters, starts with a letter and then only has letters and digits. You would write it like that:
^[a-zA-Z][a-zA-Z0-9]{4,19}$
This expects first a letter and then 4-19 letters or digits.
BTW: https://regex101.com/ is a great site to test regular expressions and get an explanation what they are doing.

Regex - matching while ignoring some characters

I am trying to write a regex to max a sequence of numbers that is 5 digits long or over, but I ignore any spaces, dashes, parens, or hashes when doing that analysis. Here's what I have so far.
(\d|\(|\)|\s|#|-){5,}
The problem with this is that this will match any sequence of 5 characters including those characters I want to ignore, so something like "#123 " would match. While I do want to ignore the # and space character, I still need the number itself to be 5 digits or more in order to qualify at a match.
To be clear, these would match:
1-2-3-4-5
123 45
2(134) 5
Bonus points if the matching begins and ends with a number rather than with one of those "special characters" I am excluding.
Any tips for doing this kind of matching?
If I understood requirements right you can use:
^\d(?:[()\s#-]*\d){4,}$
RegEx Demo
It always matches a digit at start. Then it is followed by 4 or more of a non-capturing group i.e. (?:[()\s#-]*\d) which means 0 or more of any listed special character followed by a digit.
So just repeat a digit, followed by any other sequence of allowed characters 5 or more times:
^(\d[()\s#-]*){5,}$
You can ensure it ends on a digit if you subtract one of the repetitions and add an explicit digit at the end:
^(\d[()\s#-]*){4,}\d$
You can suggest non-digits with \D so et would be something like:
(\d\D*){5,}
Here is a guide.

Reg Exp: match specific number of characters or digits

My RegExp is very rusty! I have two questions, related to the following RegExp
Question Part 1
I'm trying to get the following RegExp to work
^.*\d{1}\.{1}\d{1}[A-Z]{5}.*$
What I'm trying to pass is x1.1SMITHx or x1.1.JONESx
Where x can be anything of any length but the SMITH or JONES part of the input string is checked for 5 upper case characters only
So:
some preamble 1.1SMITH some more characters 123
xyz1.1JONES some more characters 123
both pass
But
another bit of string1.1SMITHABC some more characters 123
xyz1.1ME some more characters 123
Should not pass because SMITH now contains 3 additional characters, ABC, and ME is only 2 characters.
I only pass if after 1.1 there are 5 characters only
Question Part 2
How do I match on specific number of digits ?
Not bothered what they are, it's the number of them that I can't get working
if I use ^\d{1}$ I'd have thought it'll only pass if one digit is present
It will pass 5 but it also passes 67
It should fail 67 as it's two digits in length.
The RegExp should pass only if 1 digit is present.
For the first one, check out this regex:
^.*\d\.\d[A-Z]{5}[^A-Z]*$
Before solving the problem, I made it easier to read by removing all of the {1}. This is an unnecessary qualifier since regex will default to looking for one character (/abc/ matches abc not aaabbbccc).
To fix the issue, we just need to replace your final .*. This says match 0+ characters of anything. If we make this "dot-match-all" more specific (i.e. [^A-Z]), you won't match SMITHABC.
I came up with a number of solution but I like these most. If your RegEx engine supports negative look-ahead and negative look-behind, you can use this:
Part 1: (?<![A-Z])[A-Z]{5}(?![A-Z])
Part 2: (?<!\d)\d(?!\d)
Both have a pattern of (?<!expr)expr(?!expr).
(?<!...) is a negative look-behind, meaning the match isn't preceded by the expression in the bracket.
(?!...) is a negative look-ahead, meaning the match isn't followed by the expression in the bracket.
So: for the first pattern, it means "find 5 uppercase characters that are neither preceded nor followed by another uppercase character". In other words, match exactly 5 uppercase characters.
The second pattern works the same way: find a digit that is not preceded or followed by another digit.
You can try it on Regex 101.

Regex to check for 4 consecutive numbers

Can I use
\d\d\d\d[^\d]
to check for four consecutive numbers?
For example,
411112 OK
455553 OK
1200003 OK
f44443 OK
g55553 OK
3333 OK
f4442 No
45553 No
f4444g4444 No
f44444444 No
If you want to find any series of 4 digits in a string /\d\d\d\d/ or /\d{4}/ will do. If you want to find a series of exactly 4 digits, use /[^\d]\d{4}[^\d]/. If the string should simply contain 4 consecutive digits use /^\d{4}$/.
Edit: I think you want to find 4 of the same digits, you need a backreference for that. /(\d)\1{3}/ is probably what you're looking for.
Edit 2: /(^|(.)(?!\2))(\d)\3{3}(?!\3)/ will only match strings with exactly 4 of the same consecutive digits.
The first group matches the start of the string or any character. Then there's a negative look-ahead that uses the first group to ensure that the following characters don't match the first character, if any. The third group matches any digit, which is then repeated 3 times with a backreference to group 3. Finally there's a look-ahead that ensures that the following character doesn't match the series of consecutive digits.
This sort of stuff is difficult to do in javascript because you don't have things like forward references and look-behind.
Should the numbers be part of a string, or do you want only the four numbers. In the later case, the regexp should be ^\d{4}$. The ^ marks the beginning of the string, $ the end. That makes sure, that only four numbers are valid, and nothing before or after that.
That should match four digits (\d\d\d\d) followed by a non digit character ([^\d]). If you just want to match any four digits, you should used \d\d\d\d or \d{4}. If you want to make sure that the string contains just four consecutive digits, use ^\d{4}$. The ^ will instruct the regex engine to start matching at the beginning of the string while the $ will instruct the regex engine to stop matching at the end of the string.