Simple regular expression for a decimal with a precision of 2
What is the regular expression for a decimal with a precision of 2?
Valid examples:
123.12
2
56754
92929292929292.12
0.21
3.1
Invalid examples:
12.1232
2.23332
e666.76
The decimal point may be optional, and integers may also be included.
Valid regex tokens vary by implementation. A generic form is:
[0-9]+(\.[0-9][0-9]?)?
More compact:
\d+(\.\d{1,2})?
Both assume that both have at least one digit before and one after the decimal place.
To require that the whole string is a number of this form, wrap the expression in start and end tags such as (in Perl's form):
^\d+(\.\d{1,2})?$
To match numbers without a leading digit before the decimal (.12
) and whole numbers having a trailing period (12.
) while excluding input of a single period (.
), try the following:
^(\d+(\.\d{0,2})?|\.?\d{1,2})$
Added
Wrapped the fractional portion in ()?
to make it optional. Be aware that this excludes forms such as 12.
Including that would be more like ^\d+\\.?\d{0,2}$
.
Added
Use ^\d{1,6}(\.\d{1,2})?$
to stop repetition and give a restriction to whole part of the decimal value.
^[0-9]+(\.[0-9]{1,2})?$
And since regular expressions are horrible to read, much less understand, here is the verbose equivalent:
^ # Start of string
[0-9]+ # Require one or more numbers
( # Begin optional group
\. # Point must be escaped or it is treated as "any character"
[0-9]{1,2} # One or two numbers
)? # End group--signify that it's optional with "?"
$ # End of string
You can replace [0-9]
with \d
in most regular expression implementations (including PCRE, the most common). I've left it as [0-9]
as I think it's easier to read.
Also, here is the simple Python script I used to check it:
import re
deci_num_checker = re.compile(r"""^[0-9]+(\.[0-9]{1,2})?$""")
valid = ["123.12", "2", "56754", "92929292929292.12", "0.21", "3.1"]
invalid = ["12.1232", "2.23332", "e666.76"]
assert len([deci_num_checker.match(x) != None for x in valid]) == len(valid)
assert [deci_num_checker.match(x) == None for x in invalid].count(False) == 0
To include an optional minus sign and to disallow numbers like 015
(which can be mistaken for octal numbers) write:
-?(0|([1-9]\d*))(\.\d+)?
For numbers that don't have a thousands separator, I like this simple, compact regex:
\d+(\.\d{2})?|\.\d{2}
or, to not be limited to a precision of 2:
\d+(\.\d*)?|\.\d+
The latter matches
1
100
100.
100.74
100.7
0.7
.7
.72
And it doesn't match empty string (like \d*.?\d* would)