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Question

What regex will match every character except comma ',' or semi-colon ';'?

Answer 1

+3 A:

[^,;]+

You haven't specified the regex implementation you are using. Most of them have a Split method that takes delimiters and split by them. You might want to use that one with a "normal" (without ^) character class:

[,;]+

Mehrdad Afshari 2009-09-11 05:41:28

You missed the semicolon.

Vinay Sajip 2009-09-11 05:42:38

And the question doesn't specify whether adjacent separators are allowed, so the trailing '+' is slightly dubious.

Jonathan Leffler 2009-09-11 06:26:09

Answer 2

+1 A:

Use character classes. A character class beginning with caret will match anything not in the class.

[^,;]

Thom Smith 2009-09-11 05:41:30

Answer 3

A:

Use this:

([^,;]*[,;])*

NawaMan 2009-09-11 05:42:21

That requires the comma or semi-colon as a field delimiter, rather than as a field separator. The difference matters at the end of a 'line' (or other scanned record structure); typically, you don't want to insist on a comma or semi-colon after the last field. If your regex engine is powerful enough, you can use '`(?:([^,;]*)(?:[^,;]|$))`' (PCRE with non-capturing parentheses). The alternatives of a comma or semi-colon after the field, or end of record, makes things work better. Also consider whether empty fields are allowed.

Jonathan Leffler 2009-09-11 06:24:30

Finally, you have to worry about what is actually returned by the captures - did you really want the separators included, and if there are 10 fields on a line, how many of them are returned by the capture notation.

Jonathan Leffler 2009-09-11 06:25:13

You are right about all that but the reason I didn't concert those thing in my answer is that I do not know what language/library of RegEx the questioner is asking. He may be using "GREP". Anyway, I appreciate you adding those comments to clear things up for him. :D

NawaMan 2009-09-11 16:48:03

Answer 4

A:

use a negative character class:

[^.,;]+

knittl 2009-09-11 06:22:16

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What regex will match every character except comma ',' or semi-colon ';'?

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