Is there a way for a regexp to match only strings with numbers higher than a particular, multiple digit value?

Question

I know I can match numbers by doing something like [2-9] I would match only numbers 2 and higher, but what can I do for numbers with more digits?

For instance, if I wanted to match numbers higher than 734 I could do [7-9][3-9][4-9], but that would not match some numbers like 741.

Is there a proper way to do this? Also, can it be made to work for numbers with an arbitrarily large amount of digits?

Answer 1

You would need to spell out all the possible textual representation of allowed numbers. This is not what regexes are good at - it will work, but it's definitely hard to maintain/change:

^(73[4-9]|7[4-9]\d|[89]\d\d|\d{4,})$

matches all numbers from 734 and up.

See it live on regex101.com.

Answer 2

No, you can't do this with just a regex. If you are trying to do this from within a program or script, you should use a regex to extract the digits then try to parse it as a number.

Alternatively, if you are simply just trying to process a file and don't care how it's done there are various tools which can do it for you.

Answer 3

Use number of digits found in your input

may be you have 'n' numbers in your input

n=4 input = 1234; or number = 8704

So, you can use

[0-9]{4}

Or Some time you need to match the Digits must be at least above 2 means

[2-9]{4}

May be i have Digits of 4 or 5

[2-9]{4,5}

Its match

8567

94877

But Not match

2

999999999

7937827857