Question

What Regex do I need for match this url:

Match:

1234
1234/
1234/article-name

Don’t match:

1234absd
1234absd/article-name
1234/article.aspx
1234/any.dot.in.the.url

Answer 1

You can try:

^\d+(?:\/[\w-]*)?$

This matches a non-empty sequence of digits at the beginning of the string, followed by an optional suffix of a / and a (possibly empty) sequence of word characters (letters, digits, underscore) and a -.

This matches (see on rubular):

1234
1234/
1234/article-name
42/section_13

But not:

1234absd
1234absd/article-name
1234/article.aspx
1234/any.dot.in.the.url
007/james/bond

---

No parenthesis regex

You shouldn’t need to do this, but if you can’t use parenthesis at all, you can always expand to alternation:

^\d+$|^\d+\/$|^\d+\/[\w-]*$