Getting all possible consecutive 4 digit numbers from a 10 digit number

Question

I am trying to make a regex to get all the possible consecutive 4 digit numbers from a 10 digit number. Like

num = "2345678901";

Output : 2345, 3456, 4567, 5678, 6789, 7890, 8901

These simple regex are not working:

[\d]{4}
(\d\d\d\d)

Answer 1

You need to use (?=(\d{4})) regex to match overlapping matches.

See the regex demo

The regexes you are using are all consuming the 4 digit chunks of text, and thus the overlapping values are not matched. With (?=...) positive lookahead, you can test each position inside the input string, and capture 4 digit chunks from those positions, without consuming the characters (i.e. without moving the regex engine pointer to the location after these 4 digit chunks).

C# demo:

var data = "2345678901";
var res = Regex.Matches(data, @"(?=(\d{4}))")
            .Cast<Match>()
            .Select(p => p.Groups[1].Value)
            .ToList();
Console.WriteLine(string.Join("\n", res));

Answer 2

Do you absolutely need to use Regex? The same operation can be achieved much more quickly using a simple loop.

private IEnumerable<string> getnums(string num)
{
    for (int i = 0; i < num.Length - 3; i++)
    {
        yield return num.Substring(i, 4);
    }
}

private IEnumerable<string> DoIt(string num)
{
    var res = Regex.Matches(num, @"(?=(\d{4}))")
                .Cast<Match>()
                .Select(p => p.Groups[1].Value)
                .ToList();
    return (IEnumerable<string>)res;

}

On average the simple loop takes about half the time of the RegEx version.

static void Main(string[] args)
{

    var num = "2345678901";

    Stopwatch timer = new Stopwatch();

    timer.Start();
    foreach (var number in getnums(num))
    {
        // Yum yum numbers
    }
    timer.Stop();
    Console.WriteLine(timer.Elapsed.Ticks);

    timer.Reset();

    timer.Start();
    foreach (var number in DoIt(num))
    {
        // Yum yum numbers
    }
    timer.Stop();
    Console.WriteLine(timer.Elapsed.Ticks);
}