at lest 2 character in that and a maximum of 3 characters.

[KUTTAN]

I am creating a 6 character alpha numeric sting dynamically

i just want to esure that there is at lest 2 character in that and a maximum of 3 characters.
others will be automatically digits (3-4)

I made a regular expression ie like


^([a-zA-Z]{2,3}[0-9]{3,4})|([0-9]{3,4}[a-zA-Z]{2,3}?)$

but is not matching for 22XX22
here i have 4 digits and 2 letters it must be matching
what to do?

KUTTAN

[KevinADC]

Your description of how the string can be constructed is not very clear so unless you can define the possible permuations better here is a generic way to check such a string:

my $string = '22XX22';
if ($string =~ /[a-zA-Z]{2,3}/ && $string =~ /^[a-zA-Z0-9]{6}$/) {
   print "$string is good\n";
}
else {
   print "$string is bad\n";
}

[KUTTAN]

X88X88 should be matched for the regular expression [a-zA-Z]{2,3}, since there are two characters
but this is not matching
:(

[KevinADC]

No, it should not match. You don't understand how {n,n} works. It matches if the characters are in sequence, so XX and XXX will match but not X because it is only one character. Here is a solution that will work no matter where the alpha characters are in the string:

my $string = 'X88X88';
my $alphas = $string =~ tr/a-zA-Z/a-zA-Z/;#counts the number of characters
if (($alphas == 2 || $alphas == 3) && $string =~ /^[a-zA-Z0-9]{6}$/) {
   print "$string is good\n";
}
else {
   print "$string is bad\n";
}