Regex building

Posted By: DoomBringer | Sep 4th, 2007 @ 12:50 PM
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#Sep 4th, 2007 @ 12:50 PM
DoomBringer
DoomBringer
Doom!
Regular expressions have always been arcane scribblings to me -- random characters thrown together that perform magic and are inherently incomprehensible.  At least, to me, that is.

Anyhow, I'm working on learning them, and I was running into some interesting things.

First, I want to write a regex that will match if the inputted string has the same character in it three times in a row.  So, "aaa" will match, but "aata" shouldn't.  I first came up with .{3,}, but that matches anything with length of three or higher.

Another trick I want to do is to match if the characters contained in the string are sequential.  For example, "Test" wouldn't hit, but "abc" would, as would "123".

I'm a complete regex noob.  I've read some tutorials and downloaded the regulator, but I'm still confused over this.
#Sep 4th, 2007 @ 1:56 PM
Matthew van Eerde
Matthew van Eerde
AKA Maurits
Something like (.)\1\1 should do the trick for the "aaa" case.

I don't think it's possible to match "abc", "def", "(x)(x+1)(x+2)" with regular expressions.
#Sep 4th, 2007 @ 3:07 PM
DoomBringer
DoomBringer
Doom!
Matthew van Eerde wrote:
Something like (.)\1\1 should do the trick for the "aaa" case.

I don't think it's possible to match "abc", "def", "(x)(x+1)(x+2)" with regular expressions.

Thank you very much.  I will probably just write a nested loop to handle the latter case, if it is too hard with regex.  I suspect that it would be.

The regulator is pretty neat, but I didn't understand it at first.  By default it came up with all the wrong panes the wrong sizes and my brain couldn't parse it.
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