Need help creating a regular expression?

Question

Can some one make me a regular expression that matches this type of string "test,test,test,test," where there is a word then a comma, then another word and a comma, and so on. But if the string is not setup EXCATLY like that it will not match at all (that means a part of it can't match, it has to be all or nothing).

MUCH thankx in advanced for anyone who is able to create this expression for me, I really need it! :-)

Answer 1

try this:
/^([\w']+,)+$/

The apostrophe is there so you can match words like "won't". Omit if you don't care about that.
Added: I forgot that the \w class includes the underscore; if you don't want that, use [a-zA-Z]. So to match only groups of letters followed by single commas, it's ^([a-zA-Z]+,)+$. I should probably mention that the ^ and $ are there to disallow non-matching characters at the beginning and end of the string.

Answer 2

We have two solutions here:
   1.   (([a-zA-Z]*)+,){X}
   2.   (([a-zA-Z]+)+,){X}

Where X is the number of repetitions of the pattern. (in your example, X should equ. 4)

The first one, will detect null strings as well, i.e. ",,,,"
The second one, will only detect non-empty strings, like the example you mentioned.

Thanks.

Answer 3

[[A-Za-z]+,]+


should do the trick if not search regular expressions on line and that should help

RJ

Answer 4

I don't know the answer but you can find lots of tools here which may help you: http://www.regular-expressions.info/tools.html

Answer 5

do you mean a semi-colon

;