Search for repeated arabic (hindi) numerals in a string

Question

I am trying to determine whether a given strings contains more than 4 consecutive arabic (hindi) numerals. to be specific, arabic (hindi) numerals are :

١ ٢ ٣ ٤  ٥ ٦ ٧ ٨ ٩

which are unicode 661 to 669

I tried :

if (preg_match("/\b(?:(?:١|٢|٣|٤|٥|٦|٧|٨|٩)\b\s*?){4}/", $str, $matches) > 0) 
        return true;

But it doesn't work at all (always returns false).

score 5 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 11:52

5

You can try the following regular expression. \p{N} matches any kind of numeric character in any script.

preg_match('~(?:\p{N}\s?){4,}~u', $str, $matches)

If you just want to match those specific characters, you could use the following instead.

preg_match('~(?:[\x{0660}-\x{0669}]\s?){4,}~u, $str, $matches)

edited May 23 '17 at 11:52

Community

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answered Sep 13 '14 at 16:09

hwnd

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Is it possible to have it match everything except zero (in all languages also) ? – Sherif Buzz Sep 14 '14 at 13:27
1

You could use negative lookahead, adding zero in every language to a character class. `(?![0०೦൦௦౦٠])\p{N}` – hwnd Sep 14 '14 at 16:01
I mean I want it to skip matching of 0 - only match 1..9. I will try with the negative lookahead. – Sherif Buzz Sep 14 '14 at 21:38

Unihedron · Answer 2 · 2014-09-13T16:16:42.030

2

Use a character class and quantify it. See this regex:

/[١٢٣٤٥٦٧٨٩]{4,}/

Your characters are not word characters, so \b would assert a word character in front of / behind your match, remove it.

Here is a regex demo.

As a note, if you are matching more than 4 characters, use {5,} instead.

edited Sep 13 '14 at 16:16

answered Sep 13 '14 at 16:08

Unihedron

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This works fine in the regex demo, but using it in preg_match does not work properly. "Omar١٢٣" returns a positive match. – Sherif Buzz Sep 16 '14 at 14:52

Search for repeated arabic (hindi) numerals in a string

2 Answers2