What is the regex pattern for comma-separated list?

Question

Sometimes I need to make sure some input is comma-separated (or whatever-separated) list of well-structured piece of data. In the real world I needed, for example, to validate this kind of format:

foo{bar:baz,abc:def},xyz,lol{rotfl:true}

, which is comma-separated list of strings with or without arguments list (which are comma-separated too). This example is more complicated, I just mention that to prevent you guys from giving banal answers like:

Why can't you just use explode()?

Which I always get whenever I want to know something about regex better.

For the sake of simplicity, I will use another example. But please remember: this is not actual problem! It's a simplified example of more complex use cases, where I indeed must use regex.

Let's say I need a regex pattern to make sure my string is a list of comma-separated zip codes. Each zip code has format

xx-xxx

, where

x

is any number from 0 to 9 and there is at least one zip code. The list needs to be properly comma-separated, which means:

No leading comma

No trailing comma

No more than one consecutive commas

Normally, I'd do something like this:

$pattern = '#^\d{2}-\d{3}(?:,\d{2}-\d{3})*$#';

That will work. Is there any way to prevent repeating the

\d{2}-\d{3}

part of the pattern? Of course, I can save it to the variable like this:

$zipCodePattern = '\d{2}-\d{3}';

$pattern        = "#^$zipCodePattern(?:,$zipCodePattern)*$#";

Although, I'm more than curious if that can be done in the pattern itself.

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Answer 1

Use the following regex pattern:

^(\d{2}-\d{3}\b(,(?!$))?)+$

https://regex101.com/r/E1yHVY/7

What is the regex pattern for comma-separated list?

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