How can I accomplish this regex?

Question

I want a regex that matches "cell" values from A-J rows to 1-10 columns.

For example it should match A10, A1, E9

It should not match A100, A30, P7, A01

By the time being, I came up with this regex: (?:[ABCDEFGHIJabcdefghij][123456789](?![123456789]))(?<=1)(0)?

The only case where it fails is when you give it a A100 cell, it matches the first two characters when in reality it should not return a match.

EDIT: Playing around a little bit, I wrote: (?<!\S)[ABCDEFGHIJabcdefghij]123456789((?<=1)(0))?(?!\S)

Which seems to work for even most cases. I´m still open to suggestions on how to improve it / write it more elegantly.

Answer 1

You can shorten the pattern using a ranges. Then you could match either 10 or 1-9 using an alternation instead of using (?<=1)(0)? to match 10.

To prevent the partial match, you can use word boundaries.

\b[A-Ja-j](?:10|[1-9])\b

• \b A word boundary
• [A-Ja-j] Match either chars in a range from A-J or a-j
• (?:10|[1-9]) Match either 10 or a single digit 1-9
• \b A word boundary

Regex demo

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With whitespace boundaries on the left and right:

(?<!\S)[A-Ja-j](?:10|[1-9])(?!\S)