JavaScript-Regular Expressions

Question

I'm not very new with regular expressions, but I haven't been able to find an adequate expression for my problem so far:

I want to check a string that a user types into a textfield. The string has to consist of one ore more terms that are separated with a semicolon.

There are actually two types of terms:

1. The first consists of a number, followed by a hyphen and then followed by a number again, e.g. 1-4 or 22-44

2. The second term consists of a number and a comma repeated zero or more times, e.g. 1,2 or 4,5,6

All terms have to be concluded with a semicolon.

A valid input would be: 1-4;5,6,7;9-11; or 1,3;4-6;8,9,10;

I've tried so many variations but couldn't find a solution so far. My problem is that this input string may consists of any number of terms. I tried to solve this with the OR operator and "lookahead", respectively, but with no success.

Any help would be very appreciated.

Thanks much, enne

Answer 1

This regex should do what you need:

/^(?:[0-9]+-[0-9]+;|[0-9]+(?:,[0-9]+)*;)+$/

Answer 2

EDITED: The first question looked the semicolons were separators, now it shows them as terminators.

Here is a sequence of one or more terms, terminated by semicolons, in which each term is either a number or a number range or a list of comma-separated numbers:

/^(\d+(-\d+|(,\d+)*)?;)+$/

With non-capturing groups

/^(?:\d+(?:-\d+|(?:,\d+)*)?;)+$/