To match a character having special meaning in regex, you need to use a escape sequence prefix with a backslash ( \ ). E.g., \. matches "." ; regex \+ matches "+" ; and regex \( matches "(" . You also need to use regex \\ to match "\" (back-slash).
The metacharacter \b is an anchor like the caret and the dollar sign. It matches at a position that is called a “word boundary”. This match is zero-length. There are three different positions that qualify as word boundaries: Before the first character in the string, if the first character is a word character.
Use
[A-Z]?
to make the letter optional. {1}
is redundant. (Of course you could also write [A-Z]{0,1}
which would mean the same, but that's what the ?
is there for.)
You could improve your regex to
^([0-9]{5})+\s+([A-Z]?)\s+([A-Z])([0-9]{3})([0-9]{3})([A-Z]{3})([A-Z]{3})\s+([A-Z])[0-9]{3}([0-9]{4})([0-9]{2})([0-9]{2})
And, since in most regex dialects, \d
is the same as [0-9]
:
^(\d{5})+\s+([A-Z]?)\s+([A-Z])(\d{3})(\d{3})([A-Z]{3})([A-Z]{3})\s+([A-Z])\d{3}(\d{4})(\d{2})(\d{2})
But: do you really need 11 separate capturing groups? And if so, why don't you capture the fourth-to-last group of digits?
You can make the single letter optional by adding a ?
after it as:
([A-Z]{1}?)
The quantifier {1}
is redundant so you can drop it.
You have to mark the single letter as optional too:
([A-Z]{1})? +.*? +
or make the whole part optional
(([A-Z]{1}) +.*? +)?
You also could use simpler regex designed for your case like (.*)\/(([^\?\n\r])*)
where $2
match what you want.
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