Help Shortening a Regular Expression

Question

I have generated the following regular expression in a project I am working on, and it works fine, but out of professional curiosity I was wondering If it can be "compressed/shortened":

  /[(]PRD[)].+;.+;.*;.+;.+;.*;.*;.*;/

Regexes have always seemed like voodoo to me...

Answer 1

For starters, the single-character blocks can just go away:

/\(PRD\).+;.+;.*;.+;.+;.*;.*;.*;/

Next, you can group the related items together:

/\(PRD\)(.+;){2}.*;(.+;){2}(.*;){3}/

This actually makes it textually longer, though.

Answer 2

/\(PRD\).+;.+;.*;.+;.+;(.*;){3}/

I don't think you will gain much and arrive at the same exact rules. If you didn't care to make all the text between the ";" optional, then you could:

/\(PRD\)(.*;){8}/

Answer 3

/\(PRD\)(.+;.+;.*;){2}(.*;){2}/

is shorter than

/\(PRD\)((.+;){2}.*;){2}(.*;){2}/

but arguably less awesome. Both are successfully shorter than

/[(]PRD[)].+;.+;.*;.+;.+;.*;.*;.*;/

though (if only because of the character class change).

Or you could even go with

/\(PRD\)(.+;.+;.*;){2}.*;.*;/

which may be the shortest you can get with the same rules.