Question

I need to check that a string takes on the format

05:31:2008:06:27:2010

I do not have to check anything such as valid date or anything just that there are 2 digits, colon, two digits, colon, four digits…. etc

So my first attempt at this my regex looks like this

[0-9]{2}:[0-9]{2}:[0-9]{4}:[0-9]{2}:[0-9]{2}:[0-9]{4}

It does not seem to work, any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

\d{2}\:\d{2}\:\d{4}\:\d{2}\:\d{2}\:\d{4}

or shorter, with grouping and no escaping of :

(\d{2}:){2}\d{4}:(\d{2}:){2}\d{4}

If that doesn’t work you need to post more code.