Comments on: Regex Love http://www.seangates.com/2007/03/19/33/ By the looks of it {he thinks} he knows what he's doing. Tue, 03 Aug 2010 12:44:47 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 By: Mitch http://www.seangates.com/2007/03/19/33/comment-page-1/#comment-27 Mitch Mon, 19 Mar 2007 21:01:29 +0000 http://blog.seangates.com/?p=33#comment-27 Regular expressions are cool (fun?)! I use them quite often. A bit of a learning curve, but once you get the hang of it not too difficult. Using sed and regex you can do some absolutely amazing things! BTW. You need the '?' quantifier after the '-' in your 2nd example to make '-' optional... or after '(' and ')' to make both the '-' and the trailing six digits optional. Like this: /\d{6}-?\d{6}/ # matches '123456654321' or '123456-654321 /\d{6}(-\d{6})?/ # matches '123456' or '123456-654321' Regular expressions are cool (fun?)! I use them quite often. A bit of a learning curve, but once you get the hang of it not too difficult. Using sed and regex you can do some absolutely amazing things!

BTW. You need the ‘?’ quantifier after the ‘-’ in your 2nd example to make ‘-’ optional… or after ‘(‘ and ‘)’ to make both the ‘-’ and the trailing six digits optional. Like this:

/\d{6}-?\d{6}/ # matches ’123456654321′ or ’123456-654321
/\d{6}(-\d{6})?/ # matches ’123456′ or ’123456-654321′

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