What is the regex to match an alphanumeric 6 character string? - regex

I need regex for asp.net application to match an alphanumeric string at least 6 characters long.

I’m not familiar with ASP.NET. But the regular expression should look like this:
^[a-zA-Z0-9]{6,}$
^ and $ denote the begin and end of the string respectively; [a-zA-Z0-9] describes one single alphanumeric character and {6,} allows six or more repetitions.

I would use this:
^[\p{L}\p{N}]{6,}$
This matches Unicode letters (\p{L}) and numbers (\p{N}), so it's not limited to common letters the Latin alphabet.

^\w{6,}$ ^[a-zA-Z0-9]{6,}$
(Depending on the Regex implementation)
Note, that \w also matches _!

Related

regular expression to find a string that always contains 6 characters, CAPITALS and numbers only

I've been trying to catch a string (6 characters) like ABC123 (or any combination of Capitals and numbers) using a regular expression. I can catch ABCDE1 or 1ABCDE or even AC34FG. As long as the string contains at least 1 CAPITAL and 1 number the regular expression works just fine. But something like ABCDEF or 123456 does not! What am I missing? The regular expression I use is:
(?<=\t)([0-9]+[A-Z]+|[A-Z]+[0-9]+)[0-9A-Z]*(?=\t)
Any help would be appreciated! Thanks!
In your (?<=\t)([0-9]+[A-Z]+|[A-Z]+[0-9]+)[0-9A-Z]*(?=\t) pattern, you explicitly require at least 1 digit to be followed with at least 1 letter (with [0-9]+[A-Z]+) (and vice versa with [A-Z]+[0-9]+) only in between tab chars.
To just match any 6 char substring in between tabs that consists of uppercase ASCII letters or digits, you may use
(?<=\t)[A-Z0-9]{6}(?=\t)
See this regex demo.
Or, to also match at the start/end of string:
(?<![^\t])[A-Z0-9]{6}(?![^\t])
See another regex demo.
If i understand you correctly, your aproach is way too complicated.
/\b[A-Z0-9]{6}\b/
Catches any (exact) 6 character string, as long as either capitals or numbers or both are present.
Note the \b part as a word boundary, you could change these delimiters to whatever fits your need.
Another word of warning: A-Z captures only 26 uppercase characters, Umlauts or accented characters will not be cought here, use something like \p{L} if your engine supports it and your data requires it. See https://www.regular-expressions.info/unicode.html for more details.

Regular Expression For Password Field

I need a regular expression for a password field that:
Must have 1 number
Must have 1 letter (uppercase)
Must have 1 letter (lowercase)
Must be at least 8 characters in length
Must only contain alpha and numeric characters
So far I have:
((?=.*\d)(?=.*[a-z])(?=.*[A-Z]).{8,})
This meets most of my conditions above. But how can I limit this to only allow alpha numeric characters.
Use [a-zA-Z0-9] instead of . and anchor your regex:
^((?=.*\d)(?=.*[a-z])(?=.*[A-Z])[a-zA-Z0-9]{8,})$
You can change the base at the end:
((?=.*\d)(?=.*[a-z])(?=.*[A-Z])[^\W_]{8,})
This solution expects your regex engine to be anchored. If not, anchor them with ^$.
[^\W_] is negated character class. It asserts that this character is not a word character or _.
As word characters covers alphanumeric characters and underscores, this double-negated character class shorthand [^\W_] is well-used for these scenarios.
You can use [[:alnum:]] as well, if your regex engine supports ascii classes.
Here is a regex demo!

RegEx exact repetition is not working

I am a noob in RegEx and I am trying to write a RegEx pattern that has a minimum of 6 and maximum of 9 total characters, where the first 3 characters are letters (case-insensitive, alpha only) and the rest are digits.
I have the following pattern: ^\w{3}\d{3,6}$
But for some reason, that pattern returns true when I enter the following: aa12345 or Ap4587 and so on. I need that the first 3 characters are only letters (exact).
I hope someone will be able to help me on this.
Thanks!!!
\w is equivalent to [a-zA-Z0-9_]. You should change the regex to:
^[a-zA-Z]{3}\d{3,6}$
Use [a-zA-Z] for only alphabets. I prefer using [0-9] even it's same as \d for consistency
/^[a-zA-Z]{3}[0-9]{3,6}$/
\w matches a-z, A-Z, 0-9, _ and should only be used for alphanumeric character
If you want to allow a broader range of unicode values, I'd recommend:
[\p{Ll}\p{Lu}\p{Lt}\p{Lo}\p{Lm}]{3}
This will allow lowercase, uppercase, title, "other" and modifiers as your first three characters.
For example, [a-zA-Z]{3} would exclude the word "Résumé" because of the special characters. The pattern above would allow it.
I recommend you check out the documentation for regular expression character classes:
Character Classes or Character Sets
The MSDN documentation is also very good and most of it is compatible with standard regex libraries:
Character Classes in Regular Expressions
Try this:
^[a-zA-Z]{3}\d{3,6}$
as \w matches a-z, A-Z, 0-9

What is the regular expression to allow uppercase/lowercase (alphabetical characters), periods, spaces and dashes only?

I am having problems creating a regex validator that checks to make sure the input has uppercase or lowercase alphabetical characters, spaces, periods, underscores, and dashes only. Couldn't find this example online via searches. For example:
These are ok:
Dr. Marshall
sam smith
.george con-stanza .great
peter.
josh_stinson
smith _.gorne
Anything containing other characters is not okay. That is numbers, or any other symbols.
The regex you're looking for is ^[A-Za-z.\s_-]+$
^ asserts that the regular expression must match at the beginning of the subject
[] is a character class - any character that matches inside this expression is allowed
A-Z allows a range of uppercase characters
a-z allows a range of lowercase characters
. matches a period
rather than a range of characters
\s matches whitespace (spaces and tabs)
_ matches an underscore
- matches a dash (hyphen); we have it as the last character in the character class so it doesn't get interpreted as being part of a character range. We could also escape it (\-) instead and put it anywhere in the character class, but that's less clear
+ asserts that the preceding expression (in our case, the character class) must match one or more times
$ Finally, this asserts that we're now at the end of the subject
When you're testing regular expressions, you'll likely find a tool like regexpal helpful. This allows you to see your regular expression match (or fail to match) your sample data in real time as you write it.
Check out the basics of regular expressions in a tutorial. All it requires is two anchors and a repeated character class:
^[a-zA-Z ._-]*$
If you use the case-insensitive modifier, you can shorten this to
^[a-z ._-]*$
Note that the space is significant (it is just a character like any other).

Regex for alphanumeric, but at least one letter

In my ASP.NET page, I have an input box that has to have the following validation on it:
Must be alphanumeric, with at least one letter (i.e. can't be ALL
numbers).
^\d*[a-zA-Z][a-zA-Z0-9]*$
Basically this means:
Zero or more ASCII digits;
One alphabetic ASCII character;
Zero or more alphanumeric ASCII characters.
Try a few tests and you'll see this'll pass any alphanumeric ASCII string where at least one non-numeric ASCII character is required.
The key to this is the \d* at the front. Without it the regex gets much more awkward to do.
Most answers to this question are correct, but there's an alternative, that (in some cases) offers more flexibility if you want to change the rules later on:
^(?=.*[a-zA-Z].*)([a-zA-Z0-9]+)$
This will match any sequence of alphanumerical characters, but only if the first group also matches the whole sequence. It's a little-known trick in regular expressions that allows you to handle some very difficult validation problems.
For example, say you need to add another constraint: the string should be between 6 and 12 characters long. The obvious solutions posted here wouldn't work, but using the look-ahead trick, the regex simply becomes:
^(?=.*[a-zA-Z].*)([a-zA-Z0-9]{6,12})$
^[\p{L}\p{N}]*\p{L}[\p{L}\p{N}]*$
Explanation:
[\p{L}\p{N}]* matches zero or more Unicode letters or numbers
\p{L} matches one letter
[\p{L}\p{N}]* matches zero or more Unicode letters or numbers
^ and $ anchor the string, ensuring the regex matches the entire string. You may be able to omit these, depending on which regex matching function you call.
Result: you can have any alphanumeric string except there's got to be a letter in there somewhere.
\p{L} is similar to [A-Za-z] except it will include all letters from all alphabets, with or without accents and diacritical marks. It is much more inclusive, using a larger set of Unicode characters. If you don't want that flexibility substitute [A-Za-z]. A similar remark applies to \p{N} which could be replaced by [0-9] if you want to keep it simple. See the MSDN page on character classes for more information.
The less fancy non-Unicode version would be
^[A-Za-z0-9]*[A-Za-z][A-Za-z0-9]*$
^[0-9]*[A-Za-z][0-9A-Za-z]*$
is the regex that will do what you're after. The ^ and $ match the start and end of the word to prevent other characters. You could replace the [0-9A-z] block with \w, but i prefer to more verbose form because it's easier to extend with other characters if you want.
Add a regular expression validator to your asp.net page as per the tutorial on MSDN: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms998267.aspx.
^\w*[\p{L}]\w*$
This one's not that hard. The regular expression reads: match a line starting with any number of word characters (letters, numbers, punctuation (which you might not want)), that contains one letter character (that's the [\p{L}] part in the middle), followed by any number of word characters again.
If you want to exclude punctuation, you'll need a heftier expression:
^[\p{L}\p{N}]*[\p{L}][\p{L}\p{N}]*$
And if you don't care about Unicode you can use a boring expression:
^[A-Za-z0-9]*[A-Za-z][A-Za-z0-9]*$
^[0-9]*[a-zA-Z][a-zA-Z0-9]*$
Can be
any number ended with a character,
or an alphanumeric expression started with a character
or an alphanumeric expression started with a number, followed by a character and ended with an alphanumeric subexpression