Question

I’m trying to build a regex to determine if a string contains a byte of binary digits, ex. 10010011.

I believe that [0-1][0-1][0-1][0-1][0-1][0-1][0-1][0-1] would work, but I’m sure theres a more efficient way of doing it, and being new to regular expressions, I’m not sure what that is.

Answer 1

If it needs to be exactly 8 (no more/less), use this:

@"(?<![01])([01]{8})(?![01])"

If you don’t want to match something like “abc01010101xyz”, use this:

@"\b[01]{8}\b"

If you want to match all 8-bit strings anywhere in the input, use this:

@"[01]{8}"

Be aware that if you feed the last pattern an input like 1111111100000000, you’re going to get a result set like:

11111111
11111110
11111100
11111000
...
00000000