Question

This is my first time working with regular expressions and I’ve been trying to get a regular expression working that would match the following:

• apple
• apple inc.
• apple co.
• apple corp.

but would not match:

• inc. apple
• co. apple
• apple co. inc.
• apple corp. inc.
• apple inc. corp.
• and so on…

This is what I got so far (apple)\s(inc|corp|co).$

Think you could help 🙂

EDIT: It needs to work in Java. Does java have it’s own syntax for Regular Expressions?

Answer 1

You’re almost there:

^apple(?:\s(?:inc|co|corp)\.)?$

Note that if you want your regexp to be case insensitive, you either have to pass the CASE_INSENSITIVE flag when constructing the pattern or add (?i) to the pattern.