Question

First, I know my question would be possibly duplicate of this one, but I need solution which must be correct in 100%. And I am not so good in regexes to achieve this 🙂

I have maaaaaaaaany requests with few params passed like ...&params=key1=value1|key2=value2|.... There may be few params and I don’t know the order. What I need is to catch request that contains exact key1=myValue1 and key2=myValue2, but they can be like:

• key1=myValue1|key2=myValue2
• key2=myValue2|key1=myValue1
• key1=myValue1|key3=myValue3|key2=myValue2

or even more complicated. What is known:

• params is only part of the request, so it can be ?something=other&params=key1=value1|key2=value2 or ?params=key1=value1|key2=value2&something=other
• inside params parameter there are not white chars, only pair(s) of key=value‘s (separated with |)

To be clear: I know two pairs of key=value so regex is only for matching requests containing those 2 pairs. Requests could be ordered in different way. I don’t have access to request itself, I only work on saved data (as string).

Language where regex will be used is PHP. But I don’t have access to full code, because we declare regex in web application interface.

I think I need two positive lookaheads, like (?=[^\s]*(key1=myValue1)[^\s]*){1}(?=[^\s]*(key2=myValue2)[^\s]*){1} but I can’t get it to work and clock is ticking…

Answer 1

Use two lookaheads:

^(?=.*\bkey1=myValue1\b)(?=.*\bkey2=myValue2\b)

The \b word boundary anchors make sure that only entire alphanumeric “words” are matched.