Match the line after delimiter and shorter than 9

Question

me and regex never get along i get every day an email from my supervisor contains about 1000+ lines need to be sorted its like :

name|code

the goal is to separate them to 2 files

example :

• Garry Cooper|abc123h1n1
• Andy Morray|abcd
• John Travolta|123567
• Simon Person | abcd1

what i do

i look after | character i remove the whole line : if code contains numbers only and or contains letters only and or is shorter than 9

the example list becomes :

Garry Cooper|abc123h1n1

this steps i do them daily sometimes i get 2000 lines :/ real pain

i used to work with regex in notepad++ but i cant found the match for this one i am not very bad also in php help me please

UPDATE 01 : regex found (?i)^[^|]\|\h[a-z\d]{0,8}$\R? Current question : writting a small php script or maybe reusable classes

1. interface:

submit the data from text box (html form) or from txt file

2. processing :

lines that match the regex downloadable in txt file. others in a files

3. output:

2 links of the files

Thank u all for your help in advance

Answer 1

If you just use a greedy dot matching with .* you do not check the length. It can be checked with the limiting quantifier. To match just 0 to 8 symbols, you can use {0,8}. All but | can be matched with [^|]* negated character class.

Use

(?i)^[^|]*\|\h*[a-z\d]{0,8}$\R?

See regex demo (note that gm flags are used by default in Notepad++ regex-based search and replace).

Explanation:

• ^ - start of a line
• [^|]* - zero or more symbols other than a pipe
• \| - a literal pipe symbol
• \h* - zero or more horizontal whitespace
• [a-z\d]{0,8} - letters a to z and A to Z (due to (?i) case insensitive modifier) or digits, zero to 8 occurrences
• $ - end of line and
• \R? - one or zero (otpional) line break.