The Personal Web Pages of Chris X. Edwards Regular Expression Tutorial

Limiting Quantifier

The predefined quantifiers are sufficient for almost all regular expression work, but in rare cases, even more quantifier control is needed. Most regular expression engines provide a system to explicitly define acceptable quantities. This syntax looks like this:
{min,max}
The "min" is a number that represents the minimum number of the modified character to accept as a match. The "max" specifies the maximum number of these characters allowed.

Matches "10", "100", and "1000", but neither "1" nor "10000"..

If there is no maximum or minimum limit, you can leave that out allowing for a maximum limit quantifier and a minimum limit quantifier.
{min,}
/10{3,}/
Matches "1000", "10000", "100000000", etc, but not "100".
{,max}
/10{,3}/
Matches "1", "10", "100", and "1000", but only partially matches "10000", "1000000", etc. In this case, the match finds the first 1000 and ignores the rest.

Specific Quantifier

Here's an example:

This will match "1,000", "10,000", "100,000", but not "1000,000".

If you've made it this far, good job! You must be really interested in regular expressions and you are finding my tutorial helpful. Unfortunately, this is the last lesson that I've prepared. There are lots of other neat things one can do with regular expressions:

• Capturing parenthesis and back-references: (.)..\1
• Zero-width assertions (or anchors): ^, $, (?= ), (?! ), (?<= ), (?!< ), word boundaries, etc
• Alternation: |
• Conditional and other expressions (mostly Perl): (?(cond)T|F), (?{perl})

• Lazy quantifiers: *?, +?
• Atomic grouping (or possessive quantifiers): (?< ), ?+, *+, ++, {m,n}+
• Non-capturing (or grouping) parenthesis: (?: )