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Regex: How to match a string that is not only numbers

Answer 1

A:

/^\d*[a-z][a-z\d]*$/

May be a digit at the beginning, then at least one letter, then letters or digits

how 2010-09-30 13:42:11

Answer 2

+3 A:

I would do:

/[^0-9]/

That means that there has to be at least one character that is not a number, but the rest of the string could be anything.

jjnguy 2010-09-30 13:42:30

You could simplify that to /[^0-9]/

PP 2010-09-30 13:59:02

@PP, I am not exactly sure of general regular expression syntax, but I assume that the `/` means "any character"?

jjnguy 2010-09-30 14:06:11

@Justin: it denotes start and end of regex. not "any character".

SilentGhost 2010-09-30 14:11:28

This would just match a single character wouldn't it? And if the string contained a single digit, it would fail.

Svish 2010-10-01 09:57:11

Answer 3

+5 A:

Unless I am missing something, I think the most concise regex is...

/\D/

...or in other words, is there a not-digit in the string?

Daniel Standage 2010-09-30 13:53:06

this will fail if there is a digit in the string as far as I can see

Svish 2010-10-01 09:56:19

@Svish: your statement makes no sense.

SilentGhost 2010-10-01 11:06:37

@Svish, maybe you should actually try it out before saying something. It is much more concise than the answer you selected, and it does work. It will not fail if there are digits in the string, it will only fail if it cannot find a "not-digit", which is exactly what you asked.

Daniel Standage 2010-10-01 13:47:11

@Daniel: I did. And this does not match a string that does not contain only numbers. It matches a single letter that is not a digit. If I put that between a ^ and a $ for matching a string, it matches only the first of my test strings.

Svish 2010-10-03 12:43:46

Answer 4

A:

(?!^\d+$)^.+$

This says lookahead for lines that do not contain all digits and match the entire line.

Mike Cheel 2010-09-30 14:16:22

This is basically what I ended up with :)

Svish 2010-10-01 09:58:18

So...basically you came up with a complicated expression for /\D/.

Daniel Standage 2010-10-01 18:06:43

Well no \D is different than mine because it only matches non digits. Mine returns matches that include the entire string when a match is made while just \D could be multiple matches per line. My regex returns 4 matches while \D returns 17 (for each non-digit).

Mike Cheel 2010-10-01 19:20:08

@Mike Cheel I see. If that's what Svish was looking for, it definitely wasn't clear from his question. I see how that could be advantageous though.

Daniel Standage 2010-10-01 23:57:48

@Daniel, how was that not clear from my question? I even had 5 examples where I marked the strings I wanted matched...

Svish 2010-10-03 12:46:58

I think I finally understand the confusion. The answer I gave assumed that you were checking each of these strings separately. Indeed before answering your question, I wrote a script printed each string that matched the regular expression, which gave the output you requested. But it appears you wanted a regex that would pull out each of these substrings individually from a larger string. Based on the responses, I was not the only one that thought this.

Daniel Standage 2010-10-04 11:03:16

Answer 5

A:

Since you said "match", not just validate, the following regex will match correctly

\b.*[a-zA-Z]+.*\b

Passing Tests:

abc
a4c
4bc
ab4
1b1
11b
b11

Failing Tests:

Chad 2010-09-30 14:21:02

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Regex: How to match a string that is not only numbers

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