Perl Regex that limits words Length

Question

How do you create a perl regex that matches the following conditions?

So words like "barbar..", "bar.", "ba.." should be rejected in matching.

clarify what you mean by the second part, it's awkwardly worded. — Sean Nilan, Nov 18 '11 at 02:49

score 6 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 18 '11 at 02:51

6

Do you mean for a word to be longer than 4 characters, and only to contain alpha-characters?

This will match 5 or more letters from a-z, non-case-sensitive:

/^[a-zA-Z]{5,}$/

answered Nov 18 '11 at 02:51

Nightfirecat

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Nov 18 '11 at 03:15

1

I would take Nightfirecat's answer and add word boundaries to it to catch words - his is for an entire string.

/\b[a-zA-Z]{5,}\b/

answered Nov 18 '11 at 03:15

Bill Ruppert

This would work in the case that the match is supposed to be included as part of the string (and could be the whole string), where mine is specifically for if it's supposed to be the whole string. – Nightfirecat Nov 18 '11 at 03:18

score 0 · Answer 3 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:21

0

Instead of alphabets, if you want to allow alphanumeric you can use this /^\w{5,}$/ (It will also match '_')

\w normally matches alphanumeric in ASCII. For some of the exceptions, see the answer by Sinan in this post How can I validate input to my Perl CGI script so I can safely pass it to the shell?

edited May 23 '17 at 12:21

Community

answered Nov 18 '11 at 03:07

SAN

This would allow numbers (like you said), but also underscores (`_`). – Nightfirecat Nov 18 '11 at 03:11

3 Answers3