Question

My regex was working – until the form of the string it was capturing slightly changed. It used to always be of the form :

Word1 - Word2 - 01.2.3456.7890 - xx-xx - Word 3 [Word-inbracket]

Where I was interested in capturing the xx-xx.

For capturing this data, the following regex worked :

(.+\s*-\s*.+\s*-\s*.+)\s*-\s*(\w{1,3}\s*-\s*\w{1,3})\s*-\s*.+

Selecting groups[2] from it.

Now, however, the string has changed form so that sometimes there is another dash, and another set of letters between 1 and 4 characters after the xx-xx. (Remember, this only happens sometimes).

So, now I also need to capture the info where it is of the form :

Word1 - Word2 - 01.2.3456.7890 - xx-xx-XxxX - Word 3 [Word-inbracket]
Word1 - Word2 - 01.2.3456.7890 - xXX-XxX-xxxx - Word 3 [Word-inbracket]

Etc.

How can I edit my regex to capture this string in addition to the ones that were previously caught? What is the cleanest way to do this ?

Answer 1

A little hacky but that will do the trick:

(.+\s*-\s*.+\s*-\s*.+)\s*-\s*((\w{1,3}\s*-\s*\w{1,3})|(\w{1,4}\s*-\s*\w{1,4}))\s*-\s*.+