Use The Dot Sparingly

The dot is a very powerful regex metacharacter. It allows you to be lazy. Put in a dot, and everything matches just fine when you test the regex on valid data. The problem is that the regex also matches in cases where it should not match. If you are new to regular expressions, some of these cases may not be so obvious at first.

Let's illustrate this with a simple example. Say we want to match a date in mm/dd/yy format, but we want to leave the user the choice of date separators. The quick solution is \d\d.\d\d.\d\d. Seems fine at first. It matches a date like 02/12/03 just fine. Trouble is: 02512703 is also considered a valid date by this regular expression. In this match, the first dot matched 5, and the second matched 7. Obviously not what we intended.

\d\d[- /.]\d\d[- /.]\d\d is a better solution. This regex allows a dash, space, dot and forward slash as date separators. Remember that the dot is not a metacharacter inside a character class, so we do not need to escape it with a backslash.

This regex is still far from perfect. It matches 99/99/99 as a valid date. [01]\d[- /.][0-3]\d[- /.]\d\d is a step ahead, though it still matches 19/39/99. How perfect you want your regex to be depends on what you want to do with it. If you are validating user input, it has to be perfect. If you are parsing data files from a known source that generates its files in the same way every time, our last attempt is probably more than sufficient to parse the data without errors. You can find a better regex to match dates in the example section.