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thanks alot hixxy, it is perfect!!!

can i ask what the (?1) and (?2) do?

When you put a pattern inside brackets, the regex engine will remember the match in case you want to use it again later, so if you used the regex:



On the string:



Then \1 would refer to the letter "Z", because it is the first match you made, and \2 would be "ebra", because it's the second. (?N) differs from \N because it remembers the pattern, not the result. So ([A-Z][a-z]{4})(?1) would be a shorthand way of writing ([A-Z][a-z]{4})(?:[A-Z][a-z]{4})

Or in the case of the first example, (?1) would be [A-Z] and (?2) would be [a-z]{4}

I really appreciate your regex skills and your explanation.

But this is driving me crazy....
How the heck did you know what he wanted?!

The entire text of the original post consists of a hyphen.

(I am soooo lost.)

He edited his post after making it, it was originally regarding matching registration keys for some program or other.

Ah ok. Thanks. Thought I was losing my mind

I'd looked for an 'edited' notation on that post. Apparently that is optional.