case-insensitive regex for colon in a string

Question

I am trying to match a string that has the form:

abcd:vxyz

That is: 4 chars followed by a colon then followed by three (or maximum) 4 chars.

I want to do case INSENSITIVE matches.

Can anyone help with the pattern?

Answer 1

/^[a-z]{4}:[a-z]{3,4}$/i

........

Answer 2

The following regex should work:

"^[a-zA-Z]{4}:[a-zA-Z]{3,4}$"

The {4} part indicates that it should match exactly four copies of the previous symbol, which can be any character between 'a' and 'z', as well as 'A' and 'Z', inclusive.

The {3,4} part creates a range of copies between 3 and 4 inclusive, while the '^' symbol indicates that it should start at the beginning of the given string and the '$' sign indicates that it should end at the end of the given string.

Answer 3

Your example was alphabetical, but it was unclear if your desired regex should be limited to that. If you wanted to match any characters in those groups:

/^.{4}:.{3,4}$/i

Answer 4

Another non-regex way to do this would be to split() on the colon. Check for length 4 on the first element, and length 3 or 4 on the second element.

var foo = 'abcd:123a';
var bar = 'fds:0';

var af = foo.split(':');
var isMatch = ((af[0].length==4) && (af[1].length==3 || af[1].length==4));
alert (isMatch);

var ab = bar.split(':');
alert ((ab[0].length==4) && (ab[1].length==3 || ab[1].length==4));