New to Regex. Could someone help me with my first example? Thanks.?

Question

What is the regex expression for this:

I want to extract a 12 digit number. The word "itemZ" precedes this number, and the letters "QQ" follows this number. I am looking for all the occurrence of these 12 digit numbers and I want the results to be put into an array. I am doing this in PHP and I need to use preg_match_all, but the regex expression for any pc language will probably work.

Answer 1

You can try

www.regexplib.com

The site has a huge collection of Regex

Answer 2

Search the internet for regular expression calculators. They help you develop a regex and visually see the results.

Your first part is simple:  \d{12} should give you your 12 digit number.

The second part is to put your text before and after:

itemZ\d{12}QQ

But you only want the number so you put parens around this part:

itemZ(\d{12})QQ

Geting all results into an array - this I have to leave for you as I am not familar with the PHP regex engine.