Regular Expression to match 3 or more Consecutive Sequential Characters and Consecutive Identical Characters

Question

I need regular expressions to match the below cases.

1. 3 or more consecutive sequential characters/numbers; e.g. 123, abc, 789, pqr, etc.
2. 3 or more consecutive identical characters/numbers; e.g. 111, aaa, bbb, 222, etc.

Answer 1

I don't think you can (easily) use regex for the first case. The second case is easy though:

Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile("([a-z\\d])\\1\\1", Pattern.CASE_INSENSITIVE); 

Since \\1 represents part matched by group 1 this will match any sequence of three identical characters that are either within the range a-z or are digits (\d).

Update

To be clear, you can use regex for the first case. However, the pattern is so laborious and ridiculously convoluted that you are better off not doing it at all. Especially if you wanted to REALLY cover all the alphabet. In that case you should probably generate the pattern programmatically by iterating the char codes of the Unicode charset or something like that and generate groupings for every three consecutive characters. However, you should realize that by having generated such a large decision tree for the pattern matcher, the marching performance is bound to suffer (O(n) where n is the number of groups which is the size of the Unicode charset minus 2).