Regular Expressions anyone?

[george]

I have a string pattern I want to match with preg_match,a match starts with 99 or 88, thenfive digits from 00000-99999, followed byto upper case letters. the regular expression I came up with is

if (preg_match("/^[99|88]([0-9]{5})([A-Z]{2}$)/", $subject1)) {    echo "A match was found.<br />";} else {    echo "A match was not found.<br />";}

and the strings I chose to test are:/* THREE TRUE */$subject1 = "9912345AB";$subject2 = "8888412CC";$subject3 = "8845459ZA";/* THREE FALSE */$subject4 = "7712345AB";$subject5 = "9912345ab";$subject6 = "99123AB";What am I missing?As always, help very much appreciated.

[birbal]

It looks ok. There are free regex checker proogram. you may want to download one of them

[Ingolme]

Your problem here is using square brackets instead of parenthesis: [99|88] instead of (99|88)

[george]

Your problem here is using square brackets instead of parenthesis: [99|88] instead of (99|88)

Tried that, did not work. Then I found on Wikipedia that [...] Denotes a set of possible character matches. 99 or 88 in my case.Where as ( ) Groups a series of pattern elements to a single element. Plus that section of the regular expression works just fine.Thanks for looking though.

[justsomeguy]

That part doesn't work fine, square brackets denote a character class. You are telling it to look for the digit 9, or the digit 9, or the character "|", or the digit 8, or the digit 8. That's what square brackets means, it is a class of characters where it matches one character inside the class. Check this page: http://www.quanetic.com/Regex In the pattern box, enter this: /^[99|88]$/ In the haystack box, notice that when you enter "99" or "88" it does not match. It will match if you enter "9", "|", or "8", because that's what you're telling it to look for. If you replace the square brackets with parentheses it matches either "99" or "88". Try this pattern: /^(99|88)[0-9]{5}[A-Z]{2}$/ When in doubt, use a tool to test the parts of your pattern. Don't assume you know what anything is doing if you haven't tested each part.

[george]

I stand corrected and my problem is solved. Thanks again everyone.