Today I needed a regex in order to validate a
MAC address field from a form. The other responses in this
thread are excellent, but here's another alternative for
this task:
^(?:[[:xdigit:]]{1,2}[-:]){5}[[:xdigit:]]{1,2}$
I wanted to allow
a user to type in
a:b:c:d:e:f instead of
0a:0b:0c:0d:0e:0f,
hence the {1,2} quantifiers. Using the POSIX character class
:xdigit: tidies things up and makes it obvious what input is
required, which helps document the code. I liked
petdance's
solution (
++), but didn't use it because in my application I
only wanted to allow ':' as the separator.
Thanks to the helpful CB people who assisted me with this:
blakem,
demerphq,
davorg &
Petruchio.