Question

I am having a slight problem in Regular expressions, I would like to check if my string is in the range of 2008-13.
This is were I won’t to place the Regex

Array[k].startsWith("")

I have tried so far:

(200+[8-9])|(201+[0-9])

and

^20+[0-1][0-9]$

but the second one I think it will give me 2000-2019.

I would appreciate any help.

Answer 1

Your mistake is in using +. Fix your regex as following:

(200[8-9])|(201[0-9])

But better extract the year, parse it and verify as integer:

Pattern p = Pattern.compile("(\\d{4})");
Matcher m = p.matcher(str);
if (m.find()) {
    int year = Integer.parseInt(m.group(1));
    if (year > 2008  && year < 2019) {
        // do something
    }
}

This is much more robust for future modification: the year top and bottom values can be read from file, DB etc in future.