If you’re using Java or Scala and need to write a pattern that matches a range of characters, where those characters occur between a minimum and maximum number of times in the pattern, the following example shows a solution I’m currently using.
The idea is that the pattern "[a-zA-Z0-9]{1,4}" means, “Match a string that has only the characters a-z, A-Z, and 0-9, where those characters occur a minimum of one time and a maximum of four times.” The following tests in the Scala REPL shows how this works:
scala> val pattern = "[a-zA-Z0-9]{1,4}"
pattern: String = [a-zA-Z0-9]{1,4}
scala> "".matches(pattern)
res0: Boolean = false
scala> " ".matches(pattern)
res1: Boolean = false
scala> "f".matches(pattern)
res2: Boolean = true
scala> "foob".matches(pattern)
res3: Boolean = true
scala> "foobar".matches(pattern)
res4: Boolean = false
scala> "FOOB".matches(pattern)
res5: Boolean = true
scala> "1234".matches(pattern)
res6: Boolean = true
scala> "1-234".matches(pattern)
res7: Boolean = false
While those examples are shown in Scala, they easily translate to Java if you need to use the same approach in Java code. If you need to do a pattern match on a string to look for a range of characters that occur somewhere between a minimum and maximum number of times, I hope this code is helpful. (And for more information, see the Java Pattern class.)
