Regular expression to skip character in capture group

Question

Is it possible to skip a couple of characters in a capture group in regular expressions? I am using .NET regexes but that shouldn't matter.

Basically, what I am looking for is:

[random text]AB-123[random text]

and I need to capture 'AB123', without the hyphen.

I know that AB is 2 or 3 uppercase characters and 123 is 2 or 3 digits, but that's not the hard part. The hard part (at least for me) is skipping the hyphen.

I guess I could capture both separately and then concatenate them in code, but I wish I had a more elegant, regex-only solution.

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

In short: You can't. A match is always consecutive, even when it contains things as zero-width assertions there is no way around matching the next character if you want to get to the one after it.

Answer 2

There really isn't a way to create an expression such that the matched text is different than what is found in the source text. You will need to remove the hyphen in a separate step either by matching the first and second parts individually and concatenating the two groups:

match = Regex.Match( text, "([A-B]{2,3})-([0-9]{2,3})" ); matchedText = string.Format( "{0}{1}",      match.Groups.Item(1).Value,      match.Groups.Item(2).Value ); 

Or by removing the hyphen in a step separate from the matching process:

match = Regex.Match( text, "[A-B]{2,3}-[0-9]{2,3}" ); matchedText = match.Value.Replace( "-", "" );