I need a regular expression that matches either 8 letter words ending in "tion" or 10 letter words ending in "able".
Here is what I came up with, but for some reason http://regex101.com tells me there are no matches when I try to match a string.
My idea is as follows:
([a-z]{4}^\btion\b|[a-z]{6}^\bable\b)
Link to regex101 - Here
\b matches a word boundary. You should only have this at the beginning and end of the word, not before the suffix. You can take it outside the grouping parentheses, since all the alternatives are supposed to match at word boundaries.
\b([a-z]{4}tion|[a-z]{6}able)\b
You don't need ^ at all, it matches the beginning of the string.
Try this one:
\b([a-z]{4}tion|[a-z]{6}able)\b
Demo
You use ^\b between the variable section (e.g. [a-z]{4}) and constant postfix (e.g. tion) and that breaks the match. ^ means "beginning of the string (or a line)" and \b means "word boundary". Using it together makes little sense, as beginning of the string is always a word boundary.
Related
I have a regular expression to escape all special characters in a search string. This works great, however I can't seem to get it to work with word boundaries. For example, with the haystack
add +
or
add (+)
and the needle
+
the regular expression /\+/gi matches the "+". However the regular expression /\b\+/gi doesn't. Any ideas on how to make this work?
Using
add (plus)
as the haystack and /\bplus/gi as the regex, it matches fine. I just can't figure out why the escaped characters are having problems.
\b is a zero-width assertion: it doesn't consume any characters, it just asserts that a certain condition holds at a given position. A word boundary asserts that the position is either preceded by a word character and not followed by one, or followed by a word character and not preceded by one. (A "word character" is a letter, a digit, or an underscore.) In your string:
add +
...there's a word boundary at the beginning because the a is not preceded by a word character, and there's one after the second d because it's not followed by a word character. The \b in your regex (/\b\+/) is trying to match between the space and the +, which doesn't work because neither of those is a word character.
Try changing it to:
/\b\s?+/gi
Edit:
Extend this concept as far as you want. If you want the first + after any word boundary:
/\b[^+]*+/gi
Boundaries are very conditional assertions; what they anchor depends on what they touch. See this answer for a detailed explanation, along with what else you can do to deal with it.
I have a string foo-foo-AB1234-foo-AB12345678. The string can be in any format, is there a way of matching only the following pattern letter,letter,digits 3-5 ?
I have the following implementation:
preg_match_all('/[A-Za-z]{2}[0-9]{3,6}/', $string, $matches);
Unfortunately this finds a match on AB1234 AND AB12345678 which has more than 6 digits. I only wish to find a match on AB1234 in this instance.
I tried:
preg_match_all('/^[A-Za-z]{2}[0-9]{3,6}$/', $string, $matches);
You will notice ^ and $ to mark the beginning and end, but this only applies to the string, not the section, therefore no match is found.
I understand why the code is behaving like it is. It makes logical sense. I can't figure out the solution though.
You must be looking for word boundaries \b:
\b\p{L}{2}\p{N}{3,5}\b
See demo
Note that \p{L} matches a Unicode letter, and \p{N} matches a Unicode number.
You can as well use your modified regex \b[a-zA-Z]{2}[0-9]{3,5}\b. Note that using anchors makes your regex match only at the beginning of a string (with ^) or/and at the end of the string (with $).
In case you have underscored words (like foo-foo_AB1234_foo_AB12345678_string), you will need a slight modification:
(?<=\b|_)\p{L}{2}\p{N}{3,5}(?=\b|_)
You have to end your regular expression with a pattern for a non-digit. In Java this would be \D, this should be the same in PHP.
I'm trying to capture words in a string like:
1vTvFpU
KOoy6Cc
With regex pattern:
\b(?=(?:.*?[a-z]){1,})[A-Za-z0-9\/\-_.]{7,7}\b
But I have a problem because it also matches words like:
FDSFDFI
WEWEFDP
RRRRRRR
In a string:
FDSFDFI sdfdfdf
WEWEFDP traliii
RRRRRRR sdfdfdf
What Am I doing wrong?
I suggest you to use \S* instead of .* inside the lookahead. Because when you include .*? inside the lookahead, it checks for atleast one lower-case letter for the whole line not for the word.
\b(?=(?:\S*?[a-z]))[A-Za-z0-9\/\-_.]{7}\b
{7,7} is equal to {7}
DEMO
No need to use a lookahead to do that, character classes suffice:
[^\Wa-z]*+\w+
Then checks the string length with php (for example with array_filter).
im looking for a regex that matches words that repeat a letter(s) more than once and that are next to each other.
Here's an example:
This is an exxxmaple oooonnnnllllyyyyy!
By far I havent found anything that can exactly match:
exxxmaple and oooonnnnllllyyyyy
I need to find it and place them in an array, like this:
preg_match_all('/\b(???)\b/', $str, $arr) );
Can somebody explain what regexp i have to use?
You can use a very simple regex like
\S*(\w)(?=\1+)\S*
See how the regex matches at http://regex101.com/r/rF3pR7/3
\S matches anything other than a space
* quantifier, zero or more occurance of \S
(\w) matches a single character, captures in \1
(?=\1+) postive look ahead. Asserts that the captrued character is followed by itsef \1
+ quantifiers, one or more occurence of the repeated character
\S* matches anything other than space
EDIT
If the repeating must be more than once, a slight modification of the regex would do the trick
\S*(\w)(?=\1{2,})\S*
for example http://regex101.com/r/rF3pR7/5
Use this if you want discard words like apple etc .
\b\w*(\w)(?=\1\1+)\w*\b
or
\b(?=[^\s]*(\w)\1\1+)\w+\b
Try this.See demo.
http://regex101.com/r/kP8uF5/20
http://regex101.com/r/kP8uF5/21
You can use this pattern:
\b\w*?(\w)\1{2}\w*
The \w class and the word-boundary \b limit the search to words. Note that the word boundary can be removed, however, it reduces the number of steps to obtain a match (as the lazy quantifier). Note too, that if you are looking for words (in the common meaning), you need to remove the word boundary and to use [a-zA-Z] instead of \w.
(\w)\1{2} checks if a repeated character is present. A word character is captured in group 1 and must be followed with the content of the capture group (the backreference \1).
I'm trying to match all occurances of "string" in something like the following sequence except those inside ##
as87dio u8u u7o #string# ou os8 string os u
i.e. the second occurrence should be matched but not the first
Can anyone give me a solution?
You can use negative lookahead and lookbehind:
(?<!#)string(?!#)
EDIT
NOTE: As per Marks comments below, this would not match #string or string#.
You can try:
(?:[^#])string(?:[^#])
OK,
If you want to NOT match a character you put it in a character class (square brackets) and start it with the ^ character which negates it, for example [^a] means any character but a lowercase 'a'.
So if you want NOT at-sign, followed by string, followed by another NOT at-sign, you want
[^#]string[^#]
Now, the problem is that the character classes will each match a character, so in your example we'd get " string " which includes the leading and trailing whitespace. So, there's another construct that tells you not to match anything, and that is parens with a ?: in the beginning. (?: ). So you surround the ends with that.
(?:[^#])string(?:[^#])
OK, but now it doesn't match at the start of string (which, confusingly, is the ^ character doing double-duty outside a character class) or at the end of string $. So we have to use the OR character | to say "give me a non-at-sign OR start of string" and at the end "give me an non-at-sign OR end of string" like this:
(?:[^#]|^)string(?:[^#]|$)
EDIT: The negative backward and forward lookahead is a simpler (and clever) solution, but not available to all regular expression engines.
Now a follow-up question. If you had the word "astringent" would you still want to match the "string" inside? In other words, does "string" have to be a word by itself? (Despite my initial reaction, this can get pretty complicated :) )