Question

I am new to write regular expressions so please help.

I want to match this pattern (in Java):

"ABC",010,00,"123",0,"time","time",01,00, 10,    10,88,217," ",," "

the data I get will always be in the above format with 16 values. But the format will never change.

I am not looking for parsing as this can be parsed by java split too.
I will have large chunks of these data so want to capture the first 16 data points and match with this pattern to check if I received it correctly else ignore.

so far I have only tried this regex:

^(\".\"),.,(\".\"),.,(\".\"),(\".\"),.,.,.,.,.,.,(\".\"),.,(\".\")$

I am still in the process of building it.

I just need to match the pattern from a given pool. I take first 16data points and try to see if it matches this pattern else ignore.

Thanks!!

Answer 1

This should do the trick. Keep in mind that he doesn’t care what order the data points occur in (ie. they could all be strings or all numbers).

(\s?("[\w\s]*"|\d*)\s?(,|$)){16}

You can try it out here.