A Simple Regular Expression Question

Question

Hi everyone... this is maddeningly simple.... but i am still stumped whether my answer is right...

i want to match a string with following format....

• 70-60
• 50-40
• 100-90 //(Edit: changed from 100 -90 to 100-90)
• etc.....

i started learning regex just today.... and i worked out the pattern

/^[0-9]+-[0-9]+/$

to match the string . But testing it in some online regex testing tool i found that ti doesn't match...

any pointers that would help me..?

thank a lot in advance....

Answer 1

the "$" needs to be within the regex

/^[0-9]+-[0-9]+$/

Answer 2

how about: \A[0-9]+\s*-\s*[0-9]+\Z

NOTES:

• used \A and \Z instead of ^ and $
• added \s* to account for possible spaces

Answer 3

You're a bit off on the regular expression syntax. What you want is:

/^[0-9]+\-[0-9]+$/

Answer 4

Using regex.powertoy.org

Regex (PHP/Perl-like syntax:

m/^[\d]+\s*-\s*[\d]+$/m

Test:

70-60
50-40
100 -90

matches all three test strings.

Note the trailing m makes this a multi-line match (leading m makes this a matching regex not a substituting regex). If you put all your test data in the test area and don't use a multi-line match it won't match (well it might match the first one...) because it's trying to match the whole input (^ to $) but that regex will only match each line. Change the test data to just one (70-60) and it works without the m.

Answer 5

^[\d]+-[\d]+$

Aswell as some of the other answers works with your test data IF, you check the ^$ matches line breaks.

/^[\d]+-[\d]+$/m

Would then be the expression you should use

Answer 6

Hi Everybody...

worked it out finally...!!!

  /[\d]+:?[\d]*/

this would check for each of the following

100

100:90

90:70

thanks everybody for u'r valuable inputs...