Question

Let’s say we have two regular expressions:

1234.*

and

.*

Input:

1234567

Obviously they both match, but 1234.* matches better since it is more specific. i.e. is more relevant. Is there a standard way for checking which is more relevant?

edit:

Some clarification. I want to make decisions by checking which regexp matches the input best. In this case I am only matching numbers.

Example with telephone numbers:

Input:

31882481337

We have a rule for each of the following regexps:

31.*
.*

In this scenario I would like the rule to be used that is bound to 31.* because that is more specific for the input given. If I was not using regexps it would be easy, because I could use a scoring mechanism to check how much it matches, however these rules may have some more advanced regexps, like:

31[89].*

Answer 1

Has been a long time since I asked this question, but I wanted to let you know what I came up with in the end. I went for a far simpler approach, I just added a weight factor to my regular expressions. So you could say I defined the relevance of the regular expression myself instead of trying to define it using regular expressions:

Expression      Relevance
31.*              1
.*              0