Question

I’m looking for the perfect regular expression for validation a german car license
the number has too look like this:

1-3 Letters
a MINUS (i know the minus is now out of date, but the customer want it that way)
1-2 Letters
a SPACE
1-4 numbers

m a 12 –> wrong
abc a 12 –> wrong
m-a 12 –> correct
abc-abc 12 –> wrong
abc-ab-12 –> wrong
abc-ab 1234 –> correct
ab-ab 1234 –> correct
abc-ab 12345 wrong

I was using ([a-z]+)[-]?([a-z]*)\s*(\d+) (so without counting numbers) but it was going the wrong way.

Answer 1

Try the following:

^[a-zA-Z]{1,3}-[a-zA-Z]{1,2} \d{1,4}$

This roughly breaks down into:

• ^ Start of string
• [a-zA-Z]{1,3} A letter between 1 and 3 times (inclusive)
• - A hyphen
• [a-zA-Z]{1,2} A letter between 1 and 2 times (inclusive)
• A space character
• \d{1,4} A digit (0 – 9) between 1 and 4 times (inclusive)
• $ The end of the string