Regex to match a digit two or four times

It's a simple question about regular expressions, but I'm not finding the answer.

I want to determine whether a number appears in sequence exactly two or four times. What syntax can I use?

\d{what goes here?}

I tried \d{2,4}, but this expression accepts three digits as well.

Solution 1:

There's no specific syntax for that, but there are lots of ways to do it:

(?:\d{4}|\d{2})    <-- alternation: four digits if possible, else just two
\d{2}(?:\d{2})?    <-- two digits, plus two more if possible
(?:\d{2}){1,2}     <-- two digits, times one or two

So, for example, to match strings consisting of one or more letters A–Z followed by either two or four digits, you might write ^[A-Z]+(?:\d{4}|\d{2})$; and to match a comma-separated list of two-or-four-digit numbers, you might write ^((?:\d{4},|\d{2},)*(?:\d{4}|\d{2})$ or ^(?:\d{2}(?:\d{2})?,)*\d{2}(?:\d{2})$.

Solution 2:

(?<!\d)(\d{2}|\d{4})(?!\d)

This is the correct way to do it. The accepted answer is wrong.

It would match 3 digits (or 5). So that is wrong in my eyes.

1) Check there is no digit before a sequence of 2, or 4 digits, or after a sequence of two or four digits.

• (<!) syntax is negative lookbehind

• (?!) syntax is negative lookahead.

The above would work for mid string:

If your search string has no content around it you could use the ^ and $ start and end of string anchors:

^\d{4}$|^\d{2}$