Regular Expression 1

[bitwise]

For example, given the sentence:

"... interest rates discouraged further buying interests_1 ..."

I need to match "interests_1" only.

If I use the regular expression:

/interest.*_[1-9]/

It will match the entire sentence because of the "interest" prior to "interests_1". How can I modify my reg. exp. to account for this? Do I need to use word boundaries somehow?

Thanks,
-bitwise

 

[rosenk]

You could use [tt]/interest\S*_[1-9]/[/tt]

The [tt]\S*[/tt] would match any number of non space charactes, which would keep it from getting the first "interest".

It's hard to know if this is exactly what you're looking for, though.

 

[ryancomps]

If I understand your question correctly then I'm almost certain that the following will work.

/interests_[1-9]/

There is no need for the .* but as I said I may have misunderstood your question..

Hope I've helped,

Ryan

 

[justice41]

If you are trying to match 'interest_1' and/or 'interests_1' then you can narrow down the regex to

/interests?_[1-9]/

which just makes the last 's' optional.

jaa

 

[bitwise]

I'm sorry, I thought I mentioned this but the regular expression needs to match words like:

interest_1
interests_1
interested_1
interesting_1

That is why the .* is in my regular expression, however, it doesn't work completely b/c it matches "interest...etc". I need to make it say that it needs the underscore and the number as well.

Thanks,
-bitwise

 

[fishiface]

rosenk's solution can be adapted as long as you know exactly what you are prepared to allow:

[tt]/interest\w*_\d/[/tt]
allows "word" characters (alphanumeric plus "_&quot

[tt]/interest[-abcdfhl-r]*_\d/[/tt]
allows only the listed characters (hyphen, if required, must be first as ranges like [tt]l-r[/tt] are legal).

I suspect that
[tt]/interest[-a-z]*_\d/[/tt]
is what you are really after, to allow interest-earning_1 but not interest1_1.

Yours,

fish "As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it wasn't as
easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be discovered.
I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life
from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs."
--Maurice Wilk