Regex for no duplicate characters from a limited character pool
back referencing
can be used. Here comes an example in PHP, which is compatible to Perl regular expressions:
$string = "A, B, C, AB, AC, B, BC, AABC";
if(preg_match('/([ABC])\1/', $string, $matches)) {
echo $matches[1] . " has been repeated\n";
} else {
echo "OK\n";
}
In the above pattern ([ABC])
is capturing group which can store one out of the characters A
, B
or C
. \1
references this first capturing group, this makes the pattern matching if one those characters repeats.
I'm answering this question
Visual C++ Regex: Matching no repeating letter
which was marked an exact duplicate of this question.
No repeating of any letter ?
Does that mean consecutive letters, or is abaca
ok ?
if not, the regex would be yours modified to this :
^(?=.*[a-z])(?!.*([a-z]).*\1).{4,20}$
Expanded
^
(?= .* [a-z] )
(?!
.*
( [a-z] ) # (1)
.* \1
)
.{4,20}
$
That's easy to do with a negative lookahead assertion:
^(?!.*(.).*\1)[ABC]+$
matches exactly as you described.
Test it live on regex101.com.
Explanation:
^ # Start of the string
(?! # Assert that it's impossible to match...
.* # Any number of characters (including zero)
(.) # followed by one character (remember this one in group 1)
.* # that's followed by any number of characters
\1 # and the same character as before
) # End of lookahead
[ABC]+ # Match one or more characters from this list
$ # until the end of the string