find any combination in any order of specific characters.

[agahi]

Hi everybody

I am trying to figure out a regex that match any combination/order of digits and backslashes for example it should matches all the following strings:

 

$string = "1423/3838/894789/9387";

or 

$string = "/73636/83/398/3";

or 

$string = "3//33/3838/7474/"

or 

$string = "/";

or 

$string = "636"

 

AND NOT:

$string = "a3434";

 

Any idea?

[Jacques1]

'~\\A[\\d/]+\\z~'

By the way, those are forward slashes, not backslashes.

Edited September 9, 2016 by Jacques1

[agahi]

Thanks Jacques, it worked perfectly.

I have a follow up question, lets say I am also certain that there is going to be less than 4 alphabetical characters there and I want to match that as well for example my  string would be:

 

$string = "1423/3838/894789BLAH/9387";

or 

$string = "/73636/83/398/3BLAH";

or 

$string = "BLAH3//33/3838/7474/"

or 

$string = "/BLAH";

or 

$string = "636BLAH"

 

AND NOT because there are more than 4 alphabetical characters:

$string = "BELABELA3434";

 

I modified your code as follow but it didn't work.

'~\\A[\\d/\S{0,3}]+\\z~'

[Jacques1]

So you're allowing up to 4 alphabetical characters in one block? Or can I have something like “1A2B”?

 

For the former:

'~\\A[\\d/]+[a-z]{0,4}[\\d/]+\\z~i'

Read: an arbitrarily long sequence of digits and forward slashes followed by up to 4 alphabetical characters followed by another arbitrarily long sequence of digits and forward slashes.

[Jacques1]

Nonsense, this doesn't cover the last two cases. Let's try it again:

'~\\A(?:[\\d/]+[a-z]{0,4}|[a-z]{1,4})[\\d/]*\\z~i'