Shorthand Regex expression to match an alphanumeric pattern instead of [A-Za-z0-9]

Question

I am trying to validate a string of the pattern IN-XXXXXXXX-X, where X is an alphumeric value. For It I need to write the regex expression

The regex I write is

/^IN-\w{8}-\w/g

But it validates alphanumeric as well as underscores in place of X.The other way would be

 /^IN-[A-Za-z0-9]{8}-[A-Za-z0-9]/g

However this seems way to long. Is there a shorthand to write [A-Za-z0-9] in order to validate alphanumeric values.

AFAIK there isn't... unless you're using a specific flavor of regex, such as sed, and then you can use [:alnum:] for example — Nir Alfasi, Commented Nov 13, 2017 at 17:47
Why do you want a shorter way of doing it in the first place? — Sweeper, Commented Nov 13, 2017 at 17:49
@Sweeper My patten can include IN-X-XX-X-XXXX-XX and so on, so writing the same thing muliple times can make the regex look really longer and hence that made me think if there is a shorthand to write it — Shubham Khatri, Commented Nov 13, 2017 at 17:51
You could do ^IN-[[:alnum:]]{8}-[[:alnum:]] or ^IN-(?i)[a-z0-9]{8}-[a-z0-9] — ctwheels, Commented Nov 13, 2017 at 18:44

omijn · Accepted Answer · 2017-11-13 17:53:38Z

7

How about using [^\W_] to match alphanumeric characters?

\W - non-word characters. Basically, we match anything except non-word characters and underscores, which is the set of alphanumeric characters.

The regex would shorten to

^IN-[^\W_]{8}-[^\W_]

answered Nov 13, 2017 at 17:53

omijn

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Yes that does work and it was what I was looking for.
– Shubham Khatri
Commented Nov 13, 2017 at 17:58

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