Regular Expression to deny input of repeated characters - c#

I want a regular expression which allows the uses to enter the following values. Minimum of Four and max of 30 characters and first character should be Upper Case.
Eg: John, Smith, Anderson, Emma
And I don't want the user to input the following types of values
Jooohnnnnnn, Smmmmith, Aaaanderson, Emmmmmmmmma
Can any one provide me with a regular expression? I search for quite some time but can't find working RegEx.
I need it for my ASP.net MVC application Model validation.
Thanks
Edited: I don't know how to check for repeated characters I just tried the following
#"^[A-Z]{1}[a-zA-Z ]{2,29}$"
The rules that I would like to add are
1. First character Upper case
2. 4-30 characters
3. No repeats of characters. Not greater than 2

To perform a check on your regex you can use a negative look ahead:
^(?!.*(.)\1{2})[A-Z][a-zA-Z ]{3,29}$
The look ahead (?!...) will fail the whole regex if what's inside it matches.
To look for repeated patterns, we use a capture group: (.)\1{2}. We capture the first character, then check if it is followed by (at least) two identical characters with the backreference \1.
See demo here.

Here is what you are looking for:
^ (?# Starting of name)
(?=[A-Z]) (?# Ensure it starts with capital A-Z without consuming the text)
(?i:([a-z]) (?# Following letters ignoring case)
(?!\1{2,}) (?# Letter cant be followed by previous letter more than twice)
){3,30} (?# Allow condition to be repeated 3 to 30 times)
$
Visual representation would look like follow:

Related

Regular Expression for given scenario

I already have an email address regular expression FROM RFC 2822 FORMAT
[a-z0-9!#$%&'*+/=?^_`{|}~-]+(?:\.[a-z0-9!#$%&'*+/=?^_`{|}~-]+)*#(?:[a-z0-9](?:[a-z0-9-]*[a-z0-9])?\.)+[a-z0-9](?:[a-z0-9-]*[a-z0-9])?
but want to modify it to include the following some new conditions:
at least one full stop
at least one # character
no consecutive full stops
must not start/end with special characters i.e. should only start/end with [0-9a-zA-Z]
should still follow RFC specification for regular expression rules.
Currently the above one allows the email to start with special characters. Also it is allowing two consecutive full stops (except for domain name which is fine, so test#test..com fails and its correct).
Thanks.
^[a-zA-Z0-9]+(?:\.?[\w!#$%&'*+/=?^`{|}~\-]+)*#[a-zA-Z0-9](?:\.?[\w\-]+)+\.[A-Za-z0-9]+$
No .. and at least 1 . and 1 #.
Also starts/ends with letters/numbers.
The ^ (start) and $ (end) were just added to match a whole string, not just a substring. But you could replace those by a word boundary \b.
An alternative where the special characters aren't hardcoded:
^(?!.*[.]{2})[a-zA-Z0-9][^#\s]*?#[a-zA-Z0-9][^#\s]*?\.[A-Za-z0-9]+$

C# Regular Expression: Search the first 3 letters of each name

Does anyone know how to say I can get a regex (C#) search of the first 3 letters of a full name?
Without the use of (.*)
I used (.**)but it scrolls the text far beyond the requested name, or
if it finds the first condition and after 100 words find the second condition he return a text that is not the look, so I have to limit in number of words.
Example: \s*(?:\s+\S+){0,2}\s*
I would like to ignore names with less than 3 characters if they exist in name.
Search any name that contains the first 3 characters that start with:
'Mar Jac Rey' (regex that performs search)
Should match:
Marck Jacobs L. S. Reynolds
Marcus Jacobine Reys
Maroon Jacqueline by Reyils
Can anyone help me?
The zero or more quantifier (*) is 'greedy' by default—that is, it will consume as many characters as possible in order to finding the remainder of the pattern. This is why Mar.*Jac will match the first Mar in the input and the last Jac and everything in between.
One potential solution is just to make your pattern 'non-greedy' (*?). This will make it consume as few characters as possible in order to match the remainder of the pattern.
Mar.*?Jac.*?Rey
However, this is not a great solution because it would still match the various name parts regardless of what other text appears in between—e.g. Marcus Jacobine Should Not Match Reys would be a valid match.
To allow only whitespace or at most 2 consecutive non-whitespace characters to appear between each name part, you'd have to get more fancy:
\bMar\w*(\s+\S{0,2})*\s+Jac\w*(\s+\S{0,2})*\s+Rey\w*
The pattern (\s+\S{0,2})*\s+ will match any number of non-whitespace characters containing at most two characters, each surrounded by whitespace. The \w* after each name part ensures that the entire name is included in that part of the match (you might want to use \S* instead here, but that's not entirely clear from your question). And I threw in a word boundary (\b) at the beginning to ensure that the match does not start in the middle of a 'word' (e.g. OMar would not match).
I think what you want is this regular expression to check if it is true and is case insensitive
#"^[Mar|Jac|Rey]{3}"
Less specific:
#"^[\w]{3}"
If you want to capture the first three letters of every words of at least three characters words you could use something like :
((?<name>[\w]{3})\w+)+
And enable ExplicitCapture when initializing your Regex.
It will return you a serie of Match named "name", each one of them is a result.
Code sample :
Regex regex = new Regex(#"((?<name>[\w]{3})\w+)+", RegexOptions.ExplicitCapture | RegexOptions.IgnoreCase);
var match = regex.Matches("Marck Jacobs L. S. Reynolds");
If you want capture also 3 characters words, you can replace the last "\w" by a space. In this case think to handle the last word of the phrase.

Regex to match two or more consecutive characters

Using regular expressions I want to match a word which
starts with a letter
has english alpahbets
numbers, period(.), hyphen(-), underscore(_)
should not have two or more consecutive periods or hyphens or underscores
can have multiple periods or hyphens or underscore
For example,
flin..stones or flin__stones or flin--stones
are not allowed.
fl_i_stones or fli_st.ones or flin.stones or flinstones
is allowed .
So far My regular expression is ^[a-zA-Z][a-zA-Z\d._-]+$
So My question is how to do it using regular expression
You can use a lookahead and a backreference to solve this. But note that right now you are requiring at least 2 characters. The starting letter and another one (due to the +). You probably want to make that + and * so that the second character class can be repeated 0 or more times:
^(?!.*(.)\1)[a-zA-Z][a-zA-Z\d._-]*$
How does the lookahead work? Firstly, it's a negative lookahead. If the pattern inside finds a match, the lookahead causes the entire pattern to fail and vice-versa. So we can have a pattern inside that matches if we do have two consecutive characters. First, we look for an arbitrary position in the string (.*), then we match single (arbitrary) character (.) and capture it with the parentheses. Hence, that one character goes into capturing group 1. And then we require this capturing group to be followed by itself (referencing it with \1). So the inner pattern will try at every single position in the string (due to backtracking) whether there is a character that is followed by itself. If these two consecutive characters are found, the pattern will fail. If they cannot be found, the engine jumps back to where the lookahead started (the beginning of the string) and continue with matching the actual pattern.
Alternatively you can split this up into two separate checks. One for valid characters and the starting letter:
^[a-zA-Z][a-zA-Z\d._-]*$
And one for the consecutive characters (where you can invert the match result):
(.)\1
This would greatly increase the readability of your code (because it's less obscure than that lookahead) and it would also allow you to detect the actual problem in pattern and return an appropriate and helpful error message.

Need C# Regex to match a four digit sequence, but ignore any single digits peceeding

OK, I need to improve this question. Let me try this again:
I need to parse out a flight time which comes after an airport code, but may have a single digit and white space between the two.
Example data:
ORD 1100
HOU 1 1215
MAD 4 1300
I tried this:
([A-Z]{3})\s?\d?\s?(\d{4})
I end up with the airport code and a single digit.
I need a regex that will ignore everything after the airport code except the 4 digit flight time.
Hope I improved my question.
The solution might be as simple as:
\d{4}
According to your inputs you don't need to care about preceeding digits..
This is the answer I would use:
#"([A-Z]{3})\s+(?:[0-9]\s+)?([0-9]{4})"
Basically it is very similar to what you were attempting to do.
The first part is ([A-Z]{3}), which looks for 3 uppercase letters and assigns them to group 1 (Group 0 is the entire string).
The second part is \s+(?:[0-9]\s+)?, which requires at least one space, with the possibility of 1 digit in there somewhere. The noncapturing group in the middle requires that if there is a single digit there, it must be followed by at least 1 space. This prevents a mismatch for something like ABC 12345.
Next we have ([0-9]{4}), which simply matched the 4 digits you are looking for. These can be found in group 2. I use [0-9] here since \d refers to more digits than what we are used to (Like Eastern Arabic numerals).
Here's a little something, using lookbehind and lookahead to be sure there are only 4 digits, with non-digits (or beginning/end) surrounding them.
"(?<=[^\d]|^)\d{4}(?=[^\d]|$)"
The two [^\d] can be replaced with [\s] to only match 4-digits with whitespace around them.
Update:
With your latest update, I merged my regex with yours (from the comment) and came up with this:
"(?<=[A-Z]{3}\s(\d\s)?)\d{4}(?=\s|$)"
There are three parts to the pattern. First is the lookbehind: (?<=PatternHere). The pattern inside this must occur/match before what we seek.
The next part is our simple main pattern: \d{4}, four digits.
The last part is the lookahead: (?=PatternHere), which is pretty much the same as lookbehind, but checks the other side, forward.

C# Regex Replace weird behavior with multiple captures and matching at the end of string?

I'm trying to write something that format Brazilian phone numbers, but I want it to do it matching from the end of the string, and not the beginning, so it would turn input strings according to the following pattern:
"5135554444" -> "(51) 3555-4444"
"35554444" -> "3555-4444"
"5554444" -> "555-4444"
Since the begining portion is what usually changes, I thought of building the match using the $ sign so it would start at the end, and then capture backwards (so I thought), replacing then by the desired end format, and after, just getting rid of the parentesis "()" in front if they were empty.
This is the C# code:
s = "5135554444";
string str = Regex.Replace(s, #"\D", ""); //Get rid of non digits, if any
str = Regex.Replace(str, #"(\d{0,2})(\d{0,4})(\d{1,4})$", "($1) $2-$3");
return Regex.Replace(str, #"^\(\) ", ""); //Get rid of empty () at the beginning
The return value was as expected for a 10 digit number. But for anything less than that, it ended up showing some strange behavior. These were my results:
"5135554444" -> "(51) 3555-4444"
"35554444" -> "(35) 5544-44"
"5554444" -> "(55) 5444-4"
It seems that it ignores the $ at the end to do the match, except that if I test with something less than 7 digits it goes like this:
"554444" -> "(55) 444-4"
"54444" -> "(54) 44-4"
"4444" -> "(44) 4-4"
Notice that it keeps the "minimum" {n} number of times of the third capture group always capturing it from the end, but then, the first two groups are capturing from the beginning as if the last group was non greedy from the end, just getting the minimum... weird or it's me?
Now, if I change the pattern, so instead of {1,4} on the third capture I use {4} these are the results:
str = Regex.Replace(str, #"(\d{0,2})(\d{0,4})(\d{4})$", "($1) $2-$3");
"5135554444" -> "(51) 3555-4444" //As expected
"35554444" -> "(35) 55-4444" //The last four are as expected, but "35" as $1?
"54444" -> "(5) -4444" //Again "4444" in $3, why nothing in $2 and "5" in $1?
I know this is probably some stupidity of mine, but wouldn't it be more reasonable if I want to capture at the end of the string, that all previous capture groups would be captured in reverse order?
I would think that "54444" would turn into "5-4444" in this last example... then it does not...
How would one accomplish this?
(I know maybe there's a better way to accomplish the very same thing using different approaches... but what I'm really curious is to find out why this particular behavior of the Regex seems odd. So, the answer tho this question should focus on explaining why the last capture is anchored at the end of the string, and why the others are not, as demonstrated in this example. So I'm not particularly interested in the actual phone # formatting problem, but to understand the Regex sintax)...
Thanks...
So you want the third part to always have four digits, the second part zero to four digits, and the first part zero to two digits, but only if the second part contains four digits?
Use
^(\d{0,2}?)(\d{0,4})(\d{4})$
As a C# snippet, commented:
resultString = Regex.Replace(subjectString,
#"^ # anchor the search at the start of the string
(\d{0,2}?) # match as few digits as possible, maximum 2
(\d{0,4}) # match up to four digits, as many as possible
(\d{4}) # match exactly four digits
$ # anchor the search at the end of the string",
"($1) $2-$3", RegexOptions.IgnorePatternWhitespace);
By adding a ? to a quantifier (??, *?, +?, {a,b}?) you make it lazy, i. e. tell it to match as few characters as possible while still allowing an overall match to be found.
Without the ? in the first group, what would happen when trying to match 123456?
First, the \d{0,2} matches 12.
Then, the \d{0,4} matches 3456.
Then, the \d{4} doesn't have anything left to match, so the regex engine backtracks until that's possible again. After four steps, the \d{4} can match 3456. The \d{0,4} gives up everything it had matched greedily for this.
Now, an overall match has been found - no need to try any more combinations. Therefore, the first and third groups will contain parts of the match.
You have to tell it that it's OK if the first matching groups aren't there, but not the last one:
(\d{0,2}?)(\d{0,4}?)(\d{1,4})$
Matches your examples properly in my testing.

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