Regex for AlphaNumeric words with special characters [closed]

I am trying to make regex for capturing alphanumeric words with special characters. The search will be done on small string of 4 – 5 words max and should extract a word. The target string can be anywhere in the string but will be separated with spaces.

Eg:

"Bill No: THRD/20-21/110"
"CRN No: GSTASP/20-21/066"
"Identifier value: PCPL-2021-000152"

Need to get these values

THRD/20-21/110
GSTASP/20-21/066
PCPL-2021-000152

The special characters are limited to “/ -” .So far all my approaches have Failed

Answer

You can use a lookahead to qualify that next non-space substring has either / or - in it:

(?<=[ t])(?=[^ t]*[/-])([0-9a-zA-Z/-]+)

Demo

That only works for a substring following a [ t] taking literally your statement Target string can be anywhere in the string but is always separated by spaces.

---

If you want to capture potentially at the start of the string, remove the lookbehind:

(?=[^ t]*[/-])([0-9a-zA-Z/-]+)

Demo 2

That will capture any substring with that defined character set that has at least one [/-] in it (at the cost of the efficiency of using a [ t] delimiter as an anchor…)

Note: If you use - as a literal character in a character class it either needs to be escaped or at the end of the class. Otherwise, the - defines a range in the character class. This is a sneaky bug that has bitten many with a regex trying to capture a literal -.