> Only if you anchor it, i.e. "^.$" will match lines containing only a
> single character. Read this as "At the start of the input, match a
> single character, which must be followed by the end of the line"
> (newline or end-of-string). A "." alone will match anything, other than
> an empty line. Some regex matchers have options to implicitly anchor
> the regex but others don't.
Ah. Thanks! It now works to identify specific numbers of characters, such
as:
^.....$ five characters
^..........$ ten characters, etc.
My goal is to select a range of numbers of characters, the general form of
which would be:
.{5,10}
But in this limited set of sup****ted expressions, however, the range
metacharacters must be escaped:
\{5,10\}
So how do I incor****ate this with "."? I tried
^.\{5,10\}$
to no avail. Other permutations I can think of don't work either.
Ideas?
> Don't know if anyone has suggested this, but one way to achieve the
> match you want (in the original post) is to sort the characters of the
> field prior to matching. Then match against a simpler regex. The
> sorting eliminates the complications of specifying a regex that can cope
> with the arbitrary ordering of the input characters. Of course it may
> not be the most efficient thing to do depending upon the nature of the
> input (quantity, likelihood of match etc...) and a complex regex may be
> better.
I may have stated earlier (?) that I'm not working in a programming
language,
but simply using RegEx to set up filters in an application that sup****ts
the
basic set of RegEx expressions. The application presents a single field
within which a single RegEx can be entered. In a single RegEx, can I sort
and
match?
Thanks for your help. It is very much appreciated.
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