basic regex help please

Anonymous Monk has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

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Re: basic regex help please by cfreak (Chaplain) on Jan 05, 2005 at 17:09 UTC
You can't specify the number of something in a character class (the brackets, which I assume you meant to put but Perlmonks snarfed them. Try using >code< tags next time :) ). But you are on the right track. This should do what you want: `/^(?:[0-9a-zA-Z]\|\-{2,})/` [download] I'm assuming you want `^` to match the beginning of the line. You don't put that inside the brackets unless you want to match a literal `^`. Also note the `\-{2,}`. The comma is nessicary because it specifies that you want 2 or more hyphens. Just a 2 and it would look for exactly two hyphens. (if that's what you want then remove the comma). I used `?:` to keep the parenthisis from capturing the match, saves a little memory. You could take it out if you want to capture it for some reason. Lobster Aliens Are attacking the world!	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: basic regex help please by ikegami (Patriarch) on Jan 05, 2005 at 17:07 UTC
`/-{2,}\|[^0-9a-zA-Z\-]/`	[reply] [d/l]
Re: basic regex help please by davido (Cardinal) on Jan 05, 2005 at 17:25 UTC
Are you writing your own command line arguments parser when Getopt::Long already does that? Or is this some other situation unrelated to commandline options that requires you to locate fields starting with double hyphens? Just curious... Dave	[reply]
Re^2: basic regex help please by Anonymous Monk on Jan 06, 2005 at 09:58 UTC
Thanks for your help everyone I know have the solution. Dave I'm just using this to sanitise form inputs from a web page.	[reply]
Re: basic regex help please by Moe (Novice) on Jan 05, 2005 at 17:13 UTC
What I think you're looking for is -{2}. That specifically says: Look for two of the '-' character, in a row. Similarly, you could have (Bob){2} that would look for two 'Bob's in a row, as in BobBob. You can also set limits with curly braces. You want something that can take a two or four-digit year? \d{2,4} You want something that will match a string that you are guaranteed is at least 5 characters long, but you're not sure how long it may be? \w{5,} Hope this helps.	[reply]
Re: basic regex help please by William G. Davis (Friar) on Jan 05, 2005 at 17:05 UTC
UPDATE: Missing code tags have foiled me again :)	[reply]
Re^2: basic regex help please by ikegami (Patriarch) on Jan 05, 2005 at 17:08 UTC
The OP forgot to escape his square brackets. He posted `[^0-9a-zA-Z\-]`, not `^0-9a-zA-Z\-`	[reply] [d/l] [select]