RegEx - Match Numbers of Variable Length

Question

I m trying to parse a document that has reference numbers littered throughout it      Text text text  4 2  more incredible text  4 3  much later on    222 115  and yet some more text    The references will always be wrapped in brackets  and there will always be a colon between the two  I wrote an expression to find them     0-9   0-9     However  this obviously fails the moment you come across a two or three digit number  and I m having trouble figuring out what that should be  There won t ever be more than 3 digits  999 999  is the maximum size to deal with   Anybody have an idea of a proper expression for handling this

User · Accepted Answer

0-9    0-9      try adding plus es

User · Answer

You can specify how many times you want the previous item to match by using  min max      0-9  1 3   0-9  1 3     Also  you can use  d for digits instead of  0-9  for most regex flavors     d 1 3   d 1 3     You may also want to consider escaping the outer   and    just to make it clear that they are not part of a repetition definition

User · Answer

Try this     0-9  1 3   0-9  1 3     The  1 3  means  match between 1 and 3 of the preceding characters

User · Answer

What regex engine are you using  Most of them will support the following expression      d   d      The  d is actually shorthand for  0-9   but the important part is the addition of   which means  one or more

[regex] RegEx - Match Numbers of Variable Length

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