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Regex solution

Aditya Varma on January 16, 2019

Problem Description: Regex needs to accepts all strings of type abc.xyz.mno, it should be composed of multiple strings all joined by '.'. The joi...
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Sundeep • • Edited

With re module, fullmatch is used to match only whole string

>>> expr = re.compile(r'[a-z\d]+(?:\.[a-z\d]+)+')
>>> strings = ['abc.bcd.edsaf.asdfds', 'abc.asdf123.1234adf', 'abc.ad',
...            'abc', 'abc.', 'abc.132A', 'ASD', '1234', '1234ASF.']
>>> [bool(expr.fullmatch(s)) for s in strings]
[True, True, True, False, False, False, False, False, False]

With regex module, you can use subexpression call to avoid duplication. Also, possessive quantifiers can be used here to speed up things.

>>> expr = regex.compile(r'([a-z\d]++)(?:\.(?1))++')
>>> [bool(expr.fullmatch(s)) for s in strings]
[True, True, True, False, False, False, False, False, False]
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Aditya Varma •

Hey thanks for sharing this!

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Justin • • Edited

I'm not greatly familiar with regex so I can't speak to efficiency, but this is what I came up with on regexr.com and pythex.org/ (both require multiline to be selected for start/end ^ $ to work)

Note: strangely, your solution didn't have any matches on pythex, but we have the same results on regexr; also, I added an invalid case for a string starting with a '.'

Expression
^([a-z\d]+(\.([a-z\d]+))+)$

Text
Valid cases

abc.bcd.edsaf.asdfds
abc.asdf123.1234adf
abc.ad

Invalid cases
.abc.ab
abc
abc.
abc.132A
ASD
1234
1234ASF.
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Aditya Varma •

I have used regex101.com/ for figuring it out. It worked for me there a while back and it is not working again! I am not really sure why! Need to learn more about regex I guess.