Question

I am not good with regular expressions, and I could use some help with a couple of expressions I am working on. I have a line of text, such as Text here then 999-99 and I’d like to isolate that number sequence at the end. It could be either 999-99 or 999-99-9. The following seems to work:

\d{3}-\d{2}(-\d{1})?

But I notice that it really just seems to be searching anywhere within the text, as I can add text after the number sequence and it still matches. This needs to be more strict, so that the line must end with this exact sequence, and nothing after it. I tried ending with $ instead of ?, but that never seems to create a match (it always returns false).

I could also use some help with character replacement. I am working on a program which deals with OCR scanning, and occasionally the string value that comes back contains undisplayable characters, represented by the ܀ symbol. Is there a regular expression which will replace the ܀ characters with a space?

Answer 1

Try this regular expression.

([\d-]+)$