Question

I have facing problem for creating a Regex that accept any string other than all dashes i.e. if string contains all the dashes it should be rejected.

i tried [0-9-]* but it accept all dashes
and -*[0-9]+ it does what i want but don’t allows shuffling(I mean mixed string of 0-9 and -(dash)).

for example trt-09tr- should be accepted.
—rte434rt should be accepted.
– should be rejected.
—— should be rejected.
—6 accepted.
–u accepted.

if some one could help me.
thank you

Answer 1

You want negative lookahead for that, one that matches the whole input: (?!^-+$).*

for (String in : new String[] {"trt-09tr-", "---rte434rt", "-", "------", 
                               "---6", "--u"})
  System.out.println(in.matches("(?!^-+$).*"));

prints

true
true
false
false
true
true