Question

I am struggling with building a regular expression for parsing this kind of strings (bible scriptures):

  'John 14:16–17, 25–26'
  'John 14:16–17'
  'John 14:16'
  'John 14'
  'John'

So the basic pattern is:

Book [[Chapter][:Verse]]

where chapter and verse is optional.

Answer 1

Try this here

\b[a-zA-Z]+(?:\s+\d+)?(?::\d+(?:–\d+)?(?:,\s*\d+(?:–\d+)?)*)?

See and test it here on Regexr

Because of the (?:,\s*\d+(?:–\d+)?)* at the end you can have a list of verses, verses ranges at the end.