RegEx to find words with characters - regex

Question

I've found answers to many of my questions here but this time I'm stuck. I've looked at 100's of questions but haven't found an answer that solves my problem so I'm hoping for your help :D
Considering the following list of words:
iris
iridium
initialization
How can I use regex to find words in this list when I am looking using exactly the characters u, i, i? I'm expecting the regex to find "iridium" only because it is the only word in the list that has two i's and one u.
What I've tried
I've been searching both here and elsewhere but haven't come across any that helps me.
[i].*[i].*[u]
matches iridium, as expected, and not iris nor initialization. However, the characters i, i, u must be in that sequence in the word, which may or may not be the case. So trying with a different sequence
[u].*[i].*[i]
This does not match iridium (but I want it to, iridium contains u, i, i) and I'm stuck for what to do to make it match. Any ideas?
I know I could try all sequences (in the example above it would be iiu; iui; uii) but that gets messy when I'm looking for more characters (say 6, tnztii which would match initialization).
[t].*[n].*[z].*[t].*[i].*[i]
[t].*[z].*[n].*[t].*[i].*[i]
[t].*[z].*[n].*[i].*[t].*[i]
..... (long list until)
[i].*[n].*[i].*[t].*[z].*[t] (the first matching sequence)
Is there a way to use regex to find the word, irrespective of the sequence of the characters?

Answer 1

I don't think there's a way to solve this with RegularExpressions which does not end in a horribly convoluted expression - might be possible with LookForward and LookBehind expressions, but I think it's probably faster and less messy if you simply solve this programmatically.
Chop the string up by its whitespaces and then iterate over all the words and count the instances your characters appear inside this word. To speed things up, discard all words with a length less than your character number requirement.

Answer 2

Is this an academic exercise, or can you use more than a single regular expression? Is there a language wrapped around this? The simplest way to do what you want is to have a regexp that matches just i or u, and examine (count) the matches. Using python, it could be a one-liner. What are you using?
The part you haven't gotten around to yet is that there might be additional i's or u's in the word. So instead of matching on .*, match on [^iu].

Answer 3

Here's what I would do:
Array.prototype.findItemsByChars = function(charGroup) {
console.log('charGroup:',charGroup);
charGroup = charGroup.toLowerCase().split('').sort().join('');
charGroup = charGroup.match(/(.)\1*/g);
for (var i = 0; i < charGroup.length; i++) {
charGroup[i] = {char:charGroup[i].substr(0,1),count:charGroup[i].length};
console.log('{char:'+charGroup[i].char+' ,count:'+charGroup[i].count+'}');
}
var matches = [];
for (var i = 0; i < this.length; i++) {
var charMatch = 0;
//console.log('word:',this[i]);
for (var j = 0; j < charGroup.length; j++) {
try {
var count = this[i].match(new RegExp(charGroup[j].char,'g')).length;
//console.log('\tchar:',charGroup[j].char,'count:',count);
if (count >= charGroup[j].count) {
if (++charMatch == charGroup.length) matches.push(this[i]);
}
} catch(e) { break };
}
}
return matches.length ? matches : false;
};
var words = ['iris','iridium','initialization','ulisi'];
var matches = words.findItemsByChars('iui');
console.log('matches:',matches);
EDIT: Let me know if you need any explanation.

Answer 4

I know this is a really old post, but I found this topic really interesting and thought people might look for a similar answer some day.
So the goal is to match all words with a specific set of characters in any order. There is a simple way to do this using lookaheads :
\b(?=(?:[^i\W]*i){2})(?=[^u\W]*u)\w+\b
Here is how it works :
We use one lookahead (?=...) for each letter to be matched
In this, we put [^x\W]*x where x is the the letter that must be present.
We then make this pattern occur n times, where n is the number of times that x must appear in th word using (?:...){n}
The resulting regex for a letter x having to appear n times in the word is then (?=(?:[^x\W]*x){n})
All you have to do then is to add this pattern for each letter and add \w+ at the end to match the word !