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I have created a regular expression to find a certain pattern(example{ 008-150A-003E,9C1-E10-010 etc...) from a a paragraph but its failing by fetching me values based on length of the pattern. this is the Regx I wrote:

[A-z0-9]{3,4}[\S][A-z0-9]{3,4}[\S][A-z0-9]{3,4}

For testing I have used this paragraph given below:

****Test Paragraph******


PCB ASSLY (9C1-E10-010)
PLEASE ARRANGE QUOTATION FOR THE ABOVE ITEAM AT THE EARLIEST 9C1 E10.010

008-150A-003E  
Form BHUVANESWARI COTSPIN INDIA P LTD
asdfghjklpo
***************

I want to find only the patterns 9C1-E10-010, 008-150A-003E etc... from the above test paragraph. PS: the expression can be of theis form also i.e;9C1 E10.010, I'm inlcuding that in test Paragraph also

Abby
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  • The point is that you are using `\S`, any non-whitespace, to match hyphens. Use `-` or `[^\w\s]` (to match any punctuation) instead. Also, replace `A-z` with `A-Za-z` as `[A-z]` matches more than just letters. – Wiktor Stribiżew Aug 20 '19 at 11:33
  • @WiktorStribiżew I'm using \S because my pattern can come with hyphens,\. or even white spaces example 9C1-E10-010 can come as 9C1 E10.010 also . I'M sorry for not mentioning that earlier – Abby Aug 20 '19 at 11:39
  • Ok, I edited the answer. It must be working for you now. – Wiktor Stribiżew Aug 20 '19 at 11:44

1 Answers1

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The point is that you are using \S, any non-whitespace, to match hyphens. Use - or [^\w\s] (to match any punctuation), or plain \W (to match any non-word char) instead. Also, replace A-z with A-Za-z as [A-z] matches more than just letters. Also, to enforce length restriction on start/end, you need (at least) word boundaries.

Use

\b[A-Za-z0-9]{3,4}\W[A-Za-z0-9]{3,4}\W[A-Za-z0-9]{3,4}\b

See the regex demo

Wiktor Stribiżew
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