Question

I need to be able to determine whether or not a particular piece of text inside a text field on my form is a ProductId.

I think I may (regrettably) need Regex for this.

Anyway, there could be any number of possible things inside a search query, and I need to determine the likeliness of something inside the field being a productid.

All our product Id’s are of the following format:

AA8678NY

ONO23476

OPI765.0987

And there doesn’t seem to be any common format (there are over 400, 000 product id’s in the database).

So basically, I guess what I’m trying to say is that any product id can be thought of as starting with either 1 or more numbers, or letters, followed by either 1 dot or 1 or more numbers or letters, and ending with either 1 or more letters or numbers. – And sometimes it’s just a bunch of numbers.

Can we achieve something like this without regex?

Any help at all is appreciated.

Answer 1

You can, but why would you?
The Regex is actually very simple:

[A-Z1-9]+|([A-Z1-9]+\.[A-Z1-9]+)

If there is a known minimum length, replace + with {n,}