CPanel and Regex

[Squiggle]

Hello all, first post so please be gentle

(also not a programmer so just trying to find my way in the regex syntax - looked at various sites but can't crack the problem as yet) ...


I have an account filter that I am trying to set up that will catch a four letter string ... unfortunately the letters can be spaced in various ways:

A B C D
AB C D
A-B_C D

etc etc

I have been using A[ -_]B[ -_]C[ -_]D which catches everything except where two characters are together (like second example above).

Is there an easy way to include "no-space" as a character so that the second example above would also be caught?


Thanks in advance (and sorry if this is really simple!)

 

[cPanelMichael]

Hello

I have moved this over to the "cPanel Developers" forum because you may get more user input related to regex syntax here.

Thank you.

 

[KostonConsulting]

? will match 0 or 1 instance of a pattern so you'll want to use that after your groupings for space, -, _, like so:

A[ -_]?B[ -_]?C[ -_]?D

If that is the entire string you're trying to match, you can use the ^ (starts with) and $ (ends with) operators as well so that you don't match something like rstlneA B-CDxyz:

^A[ -_]?B[ -_]?C[ -_]?D$

 

[Squiggle]

Thanks Dave, I will give it a go!

 

[Squiggle]

Just a quickie Dave,

I have given this a go and the first example works great but the second doesnt seem to capture anything:

If I use (say) M[ -_]?O[ -_]?N[ -_]?K it captures all sorts of MONK, M-on k, m o-n-k which is great however, as you noted, it also catches "monkey" etc

When I tried the second example ^M[ -_]?O[ -_]?N[ -_]?K$ it doesnt seem to catch anything.

Am I missing something in how I am using the second example ... should this catch where there is a space at either end (" monk ")?

Sorry if this is basic syntax but I am a complete newbie at this

 

[AndrewH.]

The '$' is a special character that indicates the end of a regex, so the second regex '^M[ -_]?O[ -_]?N[ -_]?K$' is basically doing this...

(^) Find a string that starts with the following match
(M) Match the character 'M'
([ -_]) Match any of the character set ' ', '-', or '_'
(?) Match the previous step 0 or 1 times
(O) Match the character 'O'
([ -_]) Match any of the character set ' ', '-', or '_'
(?) Match the previous step 0 or 1 times
(N) Match the character 'N'
([ -_]) Match any of the character set ' ', '-', or '_'
(?) Match the previous step 0 or 1 times
(K) Match the character 'K'
($) The previous character must be the end of the string


If you remove the ^ and $ it will find any instance of MONK, including " MONK", " MONK ", "MONK ", "ASDFMONKASDF". If you want spaces you can add [ ]* to the beginning or end of the regex like so: ^[ ]*M[ -_]?O[ -_]?N[ -_]?K[ ]*$

 

[KostonConsulting]

When I tried the second example ^M[ -_]?O[ -_]?N[ -_]?K$ it doesnt seem to catch anything.

If you use ^, it means, this will appear at the beginning of my string. So if the string is 'aMONK', it won't match. It will need to be 'MONK', or 'M-O NK', or anything else that starts with a M.

Am I missing something in how I am using the second example ... should this catch where there is a space at either end (" monk ")?

Sorry if this is basic syntax but I am a complete newbie at this

Nope, it should not catch anything with a space at either end. This specifically asks for a M at the beginning and K at the end. If you also want to catch spaces, you need to add them like so (also accounting for lowercase):

[ ]?[Mm][ -_]?[Oo][ -_]?[Nn][ -_]?[Kk][ ]?

Think of each [ ] in the above as a character. [Nn] means the next character will be either 'N' or 'n'. [ -_] means the next character will be either ' ', '-', '_', or if none of those, ignore these choices and test the next pattern found. [ ]? means it will either be ' ', or if not a ' ', ignore this and test the next pattern found.

If the line always starts with space or M/m, add ^ to the beginning of this. Match only to the character K/k or ' ' by adding $ to the end of it.