Regex pattern accepting comma or semicolon separated values

Question

I need a regex pattern that accepts only comma separated values for an input field.

For example: abc,xyz,pqr. It should reject values like: , ,sample text1,text2,

I also need to accept semicolon separated values also. Can anyone suggest a regex pattern for this ?

Answer 1

Simplest form:

^\w+(,\w+)*$

Demo here.

---

I need to restrict only alphabets. How can I do that ?

Use the regex (example unicode chars range included):

^[\u0400-\u04FFa-zA-Z ]+(,[\u0400-\u04FFa-zA-Z ]+)*$

Demo for this one here.

Example usage:

public static void main (String[] args) throws java.lang.Exception
{
    String regex = "^[\u0400-\u04FFa-zA-Z ]+(,[\u0400-\u04FFa-zA-Z ]+)*$";

    System.out.println("abc,xyz,pqr".matches(regex)); // true
    System.out.println("text1,text2,".matches(regex)); // false
    System.out.println("ЕЖЗ,ИЙК".matches(regex)); // true
}

Java demo.

Answer 2

Try:

^\w+((,\w+)+)?$

There are online regexp testers you can practice with. For example, http://regexpal.com/.

Answer 3

Try the next:

^[^,]+(,[^,]+)*$

You can have spaces between words and Unicode text, like:

word1 word2,áéíóú áéíúó,ñ,word3