Question

I have this String

String criteria="ESS.(BVA4+BVA5)+(-(DIESE.(BVM5+BVM6)))";

I want to put validations on it.

1. It should only contain + – or . or all the three.
2. It should not accept other symbols like !,% etc..

How to write regular expressions for that??

Answer 1

A lot of guesswork goes into this:

boolean foundMatch = subjectString.matches("[A-Z0-9().+-]*");

This returns true if the string only contains uppercase ASCII letters, ASCII digits, parentheses, plus/minus signs or dots. It includes the empty string (if you don’t want that, change the * into a +).

Of course, it does nothing whatsoever to check whether (for example) the parentheses are balanced correctly (which you couldn’t do in a Java regex anyway).