RegEx, colon separated list.

Question

I am trying to match a list of colon separated emails. For the sake of keeping things simple, I am going to leave the email expression out of the mix and match it with any number of characters with no spaces in between them.

The following will be matched...

somevalues  ;somevalues;       somevalues;

or

somevalues; somevalues             ;somevalues

The ending ; shouldn't be necessary.

The following would not be matched.

somevalues ;   some values    somevalues;

or

some values; somevalues some values

I have gotten this so far, but it doesn't work. Since I allow spaces between the colons, the expression doesn't know if the space is in the word, or between the colon.

([a-zA-Z]*\s*\;?\s*)*

The following is matched (which shouldn't e)

somevalue ; somevalues  some values;

How do I make the expression only allow spaces if there is a ; to the left or right of it?

Answer 1

Why not just split on semi colon and then regex out the email addresses?

Answer 2

I do not know what language you are using, but all the major languages allow the split() method, which basically breaks down a string into an array given a set of characters which act as a delimiter so that the method 'knows' where it is going to split the string.

Also, there is another method known as trim(). What this method does is that it removes white spaces before and after a string. So basically, what you might want to do is to first split your string, then, for each item that you have from the broken down string, trim it and then use the regular expression to see if it fits.

Answer 3

The problem comes from the ? in \;?

[a-zA-Z]*(\s*;\s*[a-zA-Z]*)*

should work.

Answer 4

Try

([a-zA-Z]+\s*;\s*)*([a-zA-Z]+\s*\)?

Note that I changed * to + on the e-mail pattern since I assume you don't want strings like ; to match.

Answer 5

This following PCRE Expression should work.

\w+\s*(?:(?:;(?:\s*\w+\s*)?)+)?

However if putting the email address validation regular expression on this will require replacing \w+ with (?:<your email validation regex>)

Probabbly This is exactly what you want, tested on http://regexr.com?2rnce

EDIT: However depending on the language you might? need to escape ; as \;

Answer 6

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