Question

I am trying to make an regex in PCRE for string detection. The kind of strings I want to detect are abcdef001, zxyabc003. A word with first 6 characters are a-zA-Z and last two or three are digits 0-9; and this string could be anywhere in the whole text.

E.g – “User activity from server1, user id abcdef009, time 10.20am”.

How do I go about this?

Answer 1

Try this:

/[a-zA-Z]{6}[0-9]{2,3}/

If you want to limit it to whole words, try:

/\b[a-zA-Z]{6}[0-9]{2,3}\b/

• \b – word boundry
• [a-zA-Z]{6} – six letters
• [0-9]{2,3} – either 2 or 3 numbers
• \b – word boundry