Help with "BRRE" Regex... search for more than 1 pattern at a time?

Thanks for the reply Ozo. Well, with what you suggest, wouldn't that find only ONE of the patterns, then stop? Using "|" is like an OR statement, isn't it? It just finds ONE of the acceptable alternatives then quits... or am I mistaken?
   What I'd like to do (if possible), is find ALL occurrences of multiple Regex's in the target text string... hopefully all in one pass. For example, I am really just searching for phone numbers. I would like to find all the 10 digit numbers, all the 11 digit numbers and all the 12 digit numbers in the target text string. Three very simple regex's like this:

\d\d\d \s \d\d\d \s \d\d\d\d              (ie. 10 digits)
\d\d\d\d \s \d\d\d \s \d\d\d\d          (ie. 11 digits)
\d\d \s \d\d\d\d\d\d \s d\d\d\d        (ie. 12 digits)

is it possible with the BRRE engine (or any engine) to "run" all these regex's against a target text string in one go? In other words, so only one pass of the data is needed? Or do I have to run Regex # 1 against the text string, get the result... then run Regex # 2 against the same text string again, get the result... and then finally run Regex # 3 against the same text string?

Thanks!
    Shawn

You could try using lookaheads. Using multiple lookaheads should achieve matching all patterns in one go. You may even be able to use capture groups within the lookaheads if you need to extract items.

If you're not familiar with lookahead, I have an article on the topic:

https://www.experts-exchange.com/Programming/Languages/Regular_Expressions/A_4318-Regular-Expression-Lookaround-Demystified.html

Thanks Kaufmed... phew, that's heavy stuff. I am *just* getting my feet wet in Regex and that's a little over my head. may I ask if you've ever used the BRRE engine? It appears that it *can* handle lookahead/lookbehind (I found variables/routines with those words in the source code)... I just don't know how I'd code those into my regular expression, and how the results woulw get returned using BRRE. I guess what I'm needing is some good usage examples of BRRE... but the website for it doesn't provide too much.

Thanks
    Shawn

If you can find ALL occurrences of a single Regex, then you can find  ALL occurrences of a Regex containing OR clauses.

You can Ozo?? How? I thought it only found ONE of the alternatives?

Thanks
    Shawn

No, I haven't worked in Delphi. As far as I can see, the BRRE supports Perl-compatible regular expressions (PCRE), so lookahead should be in there. You basically do it like this:

(?=.*first thing)(?=.*second thing)(?=.*etc)

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Each (?= ... ) is a lookahead. You'd probably want to anchor the pattern with a start of string ( ^ ):

^(?=.*first thing)(?=.*second thing)(?=.*etc)

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Since you're just getting started with regex, I suggest the site:  www.regular-expressions.info. It lays everything out quite simply--even lookaheads.

Try this

\d{2,4} \s (?:\d\d\d|\d\d\d\d\d\d) \s \d\d\d\d

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Since \s includes the space character, what are you matching with "\s "?

A match of one of the alternatives in a regex is a match of the regex,
so if you can find all occurrences of a regex, you can find all occurrences of a  regex containing alternatives.

Hey you were right Ozo, that DOES work and it finds ALL the matches... not just one or the other. Perfect!

Thanks to the others who contributed too... but Ozo had it right on the nose.

Cheers
    Shawn