Question

i would like to use the following regex in VB.net:

(\d+.\d+)|(\?\?\?\?\?\?)

how would i do it? i actually need to edit a string to put it in the specified format

Answer 1

Dim isMatch As Boolean = _
  System.Text.RegularExpressions.RegEx.IsMatch("My test string", _
     "((\d+.\d+)|(\?\?\?\?\?\?))")

Note the extra parenthesis I added… I’m pretty sure they are needed, so both sides of the “or” (“|”) are considered part of the same group.

It also looks like there may be an error in your expression in “\d+.\d+”. If the “.” you have there is intended to match a literal period, you should use “\.” instead. Otherwise, the “.” in RegEx lingo is a single-character wildcard.

(I’m assuming you’re looking for a literal dot below…)

You could shorten your expression to this:

"((\d+\.\d+)|?{6})"

Question marks don’t mean anything in RegEx in the spot they appear in the expression, so they don’t have to be escaped with a backslash. The curly braces show the number of repetitions you want to find of the thing before it (the question mark).