Windows Batch File Regular Expression

Question

I have a following requirement that needs to be achieved in .bat file. Can some one please help.

There is a string, ABCD-1234 TEST SENTENCE in a variable, say str. Now I want to check if the string starts with format [A-Z]*-[0-9] * or not.

How can I achieve this? I tried various regular expression using FINDSTR, but couldn't get the desired result.

Example:

set str=ABCD-1234 TEST SENTENCE
echo %str% | findstr /r "^[A-Z]*-[0-9] *"

Answer 1

I'm assuming you are looking for strings that begin with 1 or more upper case letters, followed by a dash, followed by 1 or more digits, followed by a space.

If the string might contain poison characters like &, <, > etc., then you really should use delayed expansion.

FINDSTR regex is totally non-standard. For example, [A-Z] does not properly represent uppercase letters to FINDSTR, it also includes most of the lowercase letters, as well as some non-English characters. You must explicitly list all uppercase letters. The same is true for the numbers.

A space is interpreted as a search string delimiter unless the /C:"search" option is used.

setlocal enableDelayedExpansion
echo(!str!|findstr /rc:"^[ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ][ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ]*-[0123456789][0123456789]* "

You should have a look at What are the undocumented features and limitations of the Windows FINDSTR command?