I'll preface this question by mentioning that while I'm far from a regular expressions guru, they are not completely foreign to me. Building a regular expression to search for a pattern inside a particular string generally isn't a problem for me, but I have a (maybe?) unique situation.
I have a set of values, say:
028938
DEF567987
390987.456
GHI345928.039
I want to match a certain set of strings, such as:
- Strings composed of exactly 6 digits
- Strings composed of exactly 6 digits, a decimal, followed by exactly 3 more digits
In the above examples, the first and third values should be matched.
I'm using the regular expressions:
[0-9]{6}
[0-9]{6}.[0-9]{3}
Unfortunately, since all the above examples contain the specified pattern, all values are matched. This is not my intention.
So my question, in a nutshell, is how to write a regular expression that matches a string exactly and completely, with no additional characters to the right or left of the matched pattern? Is there a term for this type of matching? (Google was no help.) TIA