Regular expression

[a-z]*[[a-z-]+]*{1,10}

Very wild guess ;-)

Try

^[a-z]+\\-*|\\-*[a-z]+|[a-z]+\\-*{1,10}$

Sorry - that should have been

"^[a-z]+-*[a-z]+|-*[a-z]+|[a-z]+-*{1,10}$";

CEHJ and mayankeagle none of your suggestions worked.

The last one i posted works fine for me given your specification

Here's the output (true and false indicate a match)

C:\java\dumpit>jr Base ---jka
true

C:\java\dumpit>jr Base ---
false

C:\java\dumpit>jr Base a-s
true

C:\java\dumpit>jr Base a-
true

C:\java\dumpit>jr Base -
false

strings longer than 10 is true

test
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

everyting else work

/ TK

The string length check has to be in the regular expression. (It's a part of a much larger expression)
/ TK

Why?

The actual string that I test look like this
part1.part2.part3 or part1.part3

Part 1 must match the regular expression described in the question.
Then I will put it in a larger expression which also check part 2 and 3

/ TK

Forgot to mention, we allow the padding characters (the b's )
to be nullable. This allows us to accept strings < 10 characters.

timbauer, I thought of that solution but the problem is that the max size isn't really 10. I only used it in this example. The real max length is 63 which will give a very large expression, but as you said, it works.

I solved it with a separate length check as CEHJ suggested.
It isn't ideal in my application (it would be better if I got all in one expression), but it's better than a huge regular expression.

I will split the points ....

/ TK

8-)