Regular Expressions: Is there an AND operator?

Question

Obviously, you can use | (pipe?), to represent OR, but can you match 'and' as well?

Specifically, I'm wanting to match paragraphs of text that contain ALL of a certain phrase, but in no particular order.

Answer 1

The order is always implied in the structure of the regular expression. To accomplish what you want, you'll have to match the input string multiple times against different expressions.

What you want to do is not possible with a single regexp.

Answer 2

Is it not possible in your case to do the AND on several matching results? in pseudocode

regexp_match(pattern1, data) && regexp_match(pattern2, data) && ...

Answer 3

Use a non-consuming regular expression.

The typical (i.e. Perl/Java) notation is:

(?=expr)

This means "match expr but after that continue matching at the original match-point."

You can do as many of these as you want, and this will be an "and." Example:

(?=match this expression)(?=match this too)(?=oh, and this)

You can even add capture groups inside the non-consuming expressions if you need to save some of the data therein.

Answer 4

If you use Perl regular expressions, you can use positive lookahead:

For example

(?=[1-9][0-9]{2})[0-9]*[05]\b

would be numbers greater than 100 and divisible by 5

Answer 5

You can do that with a regular expression but probably you'll want to some else. For example use several regexp and combine them in a if clause.

You can enumerate all possible permutations with a standard regexp, like this (matches a, b and c in any order):

(abc)|(bca)|(acb)|(bac)|(cab)|(cba)

However, this makes a very long and probably inefficient regexp, if you have more than couple terms.

If you are using some extended regexp version, like Perl's or Java's, they have better ways to do this. Other answers have suggested using positive lookahead operation.

Answer 6

You need to use lookahead as some of the other responders have said, but the lookahead has to account for other characters between its target word and the current match position. For example:

(?=.*word1)(?=.*word2)(?=.*word3)

The .* in the first lookahead lets it match however many characters it needs to before it gets to "word1". Then the match position is reset and the second lookahead seeks out "word2". Reset again, and the final part matches "word3"; since it's the last word you're checking for, it isn't necessary that it be in a lookahead, but it doesn't hurt.

In order to match a whole paragraph, you need to anchor the regex at both ends and add a final .* to consume the remaining characters. Using Perl-style notation, that would be:

/^(?=.*word1)(?=.*word2)(?=.*word3).*$/m

The 'm' modifier is for multline mode; it lets the ^ and $ match at paragraph boundaries ("line boundaries" in regex-speak). It's essential in this case that you not use the 's' modifier, which lets the dot metacharacter match newlines as well as all other characters.

Finally, you want to make sure you're matching whole words and not just fragments of longer words, so you need to add word boundaries:

/^(?=.*\bword1\b)(?=.*\bword2\b)(?=.*\bword3\b).*$/m