Simple Regex Help

[Laeg]

I'm trying to capture the following

'The digit 0 followed by 1-3 occurences of any digit and then a hyphen character followed by 5-7 occurences of any digit

So like 025-23456, 057-3456789, 086-458953 etc

Dim MyRegEx As New Regex("/^0\[0-9]{1,3}-\[0-9]{5,7}/")

Does not seem to be matching for me

 

[glyns]

Try

0[0-9]{1,3}-[0-9]{5,7}

Which is based on

http://www.zytrax.com/tech/web/regex.htm

In the section titled "Iteration 'metacharacters'"

Firefox has a nice addon called "Regular expressions tester" which is handy for getting regexs

 

[HarleyQuinn]

Yeah, agree with glyns.

Thr only things you had wrong were that you don't need / to bracket the expression and you don't need to prefix character classes (the characters contained between []) with a \.

Cheers

Andy
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[Laeg]

Seems good alright but it fails on this case here

"a hyphen character followed by 5-7 occurences of any digit"

as if I try more than 7 characters after the hyphen the expression matches. Presumably the expression

0[0-9]{1,3}-[0-9]{5,7}

reads like 0 followed by 1-3 more digits followed by a hyphen followed by 5-7 digits which will match something
that has 8 digits after the hyphen as it does satisfy the 5-7 digits but just happens to have an eight too! What is the syntax for extending the last part of the expression to say a hyphen followed by 5-7 digits only?

 

[Laeg]

0[0-9]{1,3}-[0-9]{5,7}$

 

[HarleyQuinn]

As you want only matches (the current expression will match the 025-23456 portion of 3453fwer025-23456) that are exact, rather than extracting matches from a larger text you might want to add the caret back in at the start to match the start of the string:

^0[0-9]{1,3}-[0-9]{5,7}$

Hope this helps

Andy
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