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Asked: 2026-05-28T18:20:58+00:00

I’d like to create a regular expression such that when I compare the a

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I’d like to create a regular expression such that when I compare the a string against an array of strings, matches are returned with the regex ignoring certain characters.

Here’s one example. Consider the following array of names:

{
    "Andy O'Brien",
    "Bob O'Brian",
    "Jim OBrien",
    "Larry Oberlin"
}

If a user enters “ob”, I’d like the app to apply a regex predicate to the array and all of the names in the above array would match (e.g. the ‘ is ignored).

I know I can run the match twice, first against each name and second against each name with the ignored chars stripped from the string. I’d rather this by done by a single regex so I don’t need two passes.

Is this possible? This is for an iOS app and I’m using NSPredicate.

EDIT: clarification on use

From the initial answers I realized I wasn’t clear. The example above is a specific one. I need a general solution where the array of names is a large array with diverse names and the string I am matching against is entered by the user. So I can’t hard code the regex like [o]’?[b].

Also, I know how to do case-insensitive searches so don’t need the answer to focus on that. Just need a solution to ignore the chars I don’t want to match against.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Since you have discarded all the answers showing the ways it can be done, you are left with the answer:

    NO, this cannot be done. Regex does not have an option to ‘ignore’ characters. Your only options are to modify the regex to match them, or to do a pass on your source text to get rid of the characters you want to ignore and then match against that. (Of course, then you may have the problem of correlating your ‘cleaned’ text with the actual source text.)

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