Question related to Regular Expressions

Question

Hello,
I have the following Java program where i would like to accept words which contain the following characters
[A-Za-z ./-]*
Letters A-Z a-z
Other characters . / - space
public static void main(String args[]) {
      String regex = "[A-Za-z _./-]*";
      String input = "Hello-how--are you--";
    boolean isMatch = Pattern.matches(regex, input);
    System.out.println(isMatch);//return true
  } The previous code accepts all the apperances of dashes, but i wouldn't like to accept dashes which are next to each other.
I would like to accept words like ab-cd-ef-gh but i wouldn't like the dashes to be -- like this, next to each other i would like to have at least one character between them.
Accepted How-are-you-today
Not accepted hi- or az--z
What am i supposed to do in order to have the desirable result?
Thanks, in advance!

Answer 1

DarrylBurke wrote:
sabre150 wrote:
All regex are obvious and no documentation is required. That is the philosophy I used for many years so as to keep me permanently in work.And one fine day we'll see a forum post:
Can someone help explain this regex to me? The developer who wrote it has since retired.
edit Couldn't post the regex due to the forum's limit of 7500 characters :(;-)Yep - I will then suggest that they supplement my pension and pay me an exorbitant amount to fix their problem.