Question

Okay… so this may be a stretch.
I’d like to feed a List of TextStrings to a function and
then it would return the regular expression syntax back to me.
I’m working with a pattern of Tags or Tags for Items to be tracked.
I’d like to to be able to detect all the possible patterns that exist.
I thought a regular expression that could sum it up would be great.

Is this something that has been done before.

I’m working in VB.NET C# suggestions are fine to.

Maybe this is a poor programming design. But mostly wanted to now where to start searching?
What would I even lookup under google?

Or can you offer me some direction on how to design a function like this?

Answer 1

Very interesting question. Not sure if there is a good answer or not but this was the first thing that came to mind:

Loop through each target string
    Loop through each character in each target string
       Categorize that character as precisely as possible.  7 = \d, f=[a-z] etc
       Create a list of the categories for each character in order.
       Add that list of categories to a list of lists
    End character loop
End target string loop

Attempt to use your List of category lists to determine a regex that will match all target strings. For example if your List of Category Lists looks like this:

\d,\d,\d,[a-z],[a-z]
\d,\d,\d,[a-z],[a-z]
\d,\d,[a-z],[a-z]

You may be able to determine your regex needs match two to three digits followed by two lower case letters. Not a whole lot to go off of, but maybe a place to start? I’d be interested to see if you come up with a working solution…