Question

I am a total Regex newbie. I am trying to write a regex for a string that will have a hyphen, followed by any number between 1 – 9, followed by any of {mo, w, h, m, d}. I came up with:

-[1-9]+(mo)?|[h|w|d|m]

That doesn’t quite do what I want.

For ex: it matches -2wh which it shouldn’t. What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

You almost got it right.. just an small change:

-([1-9]+)(mo|[hwdm])

if you want to limit the string to have that (and nothing else) you must add:

^-([1-9]+)(mo|[hwdm])$

Also note that -10h is not going to work because you excluded the zero.. if you want to include it but not as first number is as easy as this:

^-([1-9][0-9]*)(mo|[hwdm])$