Question

How can I get a regular expression that matches any string that has two or more commas?
I guess this is better explained with an example of what should match and what shouldn’t

abcd,ef // Nop
abc,de,fg // Yup

// This is what I have so far, but it only matches consecutive commas
var patt = /\,{2,}/;

I’m not so good with regex and i couldn’t find anything useful. Any help is appreciated.

Answer 1

This will match a string with at least 2 commas (not colons):

/,[^,]*,/

That simply says “match a comma, followed by any number of non-comma characters, followed by another comma.” You could also do this:

/,.*?,/

.*? is like .*, but it matches as few characters as possible rather than as many as possible. That’s called a “reluctant” qualifier. (I hope regexps in your language of choice support them!)

Someone suggested /,.*,/. That’s a very poor idea, because it will always run over the entire string, rather than stopping at the first 2 commas found. if the string is huge, that could be very slow.