Question

I am dealing with a spambot and in order to prevent its nonsense posts I have determined that it always posts in a specific manner of [8 characters a-zA-Z] [9 characters a-zA-Z] [10 characters a-zA-Z] …

I want to capture this exact pattern so I can block it.

An example looks like this:

EifnBTVK zljhGBZty poozgzbdax JZBnNbbpt rbpdig LfpMXMEDqay LfjrLSDQ saxaUBPlc NjflPITJ gccuOZJph

I’m thinking it’s something like

/^[a-zA-Z]{8}[a-zA-Z]{9}[a-zA-Z]{10}.*/

Is that the right line of thinking?

Answer 1

You need to match additionally the empty space between those “words”:

/^[a-zA-Z]{8}\s+[a-zA-Z]{9}\s+[a-zA-Z]{10}\s+.*/

\s is a whitespace character

You can simplify your expression further by using the i modifier for case insensitive matching

/^[a-z]{8}\s+[a-z]{9}\s+[a-z]{10}\s+.*/i