How to match numbers between X and Y with regexp?

Question

I would like to match with RegExp a number between X and Y. Is that possible?

([0-9]+) will match any number, how could I do to match a number between, for instance, 110 and 2234?

Answer 1

According to Generate a Regular Expression to Match an Arbitrary Numeric Range, and after generating such a regex for your example at Regex_For_Range:

\b0*(1[1-9][0-9]|[2-9][0-9]{2}|1[0-9]{3}|2[01][0-9]{2}|22[0-2][0-9]|223[0-4])\b 

would do the trick.

The process would be (still following that Regex generator):

First, break into equal length ranges:

110 - 999 1000 - 2234 

Second, break into ranges that yield simple regexes:

110 - 199 200 - 999 1000 - 1999 2000 - 2199 2200 - 2229 2230 - 2234 

Turn each range into a regex:

1[1-9][0-9] [2-9][0-9]{2} 1[0-9]{3} 2[01][0-9]{2} 22[0-2][0-9] 223[0-4] 

Collapse adjacent powers of 10: 1[1-9][0-9] [2-9][0-9]{2} 1[0-9]{3} 2[01][0-9]{2} 22[0-2][0-9] 223[0-4]

Combining the regexes above yields:

0*(1[1-9][0-9]|[2-9][0-9]{2}|1[0-9]{3}|2[01][0-9]{2}|22[0-2][0-9]|223[0-4]) 

Next we'll try factoring out common prefixes using a tree:
Parse into tree based on regex prefixes:

. 1 [1-9] [0-9] + [0-9]{3} + [2-9] [0-9]{2} + 2 [01] [0-9]{2} + 2 [0-2] [0-9] + 3 [0-4] 

Turning the parse tree into a regex yields:

0*(1([1-9][0-9]|[0-9]{3})|[2-9][0-9]{2}|2([01][0-9]{2}|2([0-2][0-9]|3[0-4]))) 

We choose the shorter one as our result.

\b0*(1[1-9][0-9]|[2-9][0-9]{2}|1[0-9]{3}|2[01][0-9]{2}|22[0-2][0-9]|223[0-4])\b