Question

Say I am trying to match any single lower case letter separated by a colon that repeats itself, say, 5 times (but the last repetition do not have a colon anymore). For example:

h:e:l:l:o

Something like this would work:

[a-z]:{4}[a-z]

Is there a better way to do this? Can I somehow reference the first [a-z] in place of the second [a-z]?

Answer 1

Assuming PCRE/Javascript,

(?!:)((^|:)[a-z]){5}