Regular expressions question

[Duncan Booth]

"Victor Polukcht" <vpolukcht at gmail.com> wrote:

> I have 2 strings:
> 
> "Global               etsi3   *200 ok            30   100% 100%
> Outgoing"
> and
> "Global               etsi3   *   4 ok             30   100% 100%
> Outgoing"
> 
> The difference is "*200" instead of "*  4". Is there ability to write a
> regular expression that will match both of that strings?
> 
Yes, ".*" would match both of the strings, but not in a useful way. You'll 
have to consider which strings you *don't* want to match as well as which 
ones you do and whether you want to extract any information from the 
strings or find the ones which match.

But first take a step back and look at the problem as a whole. You didn't 
say what you are trying to do, and often people will jump at regular 
expressions as the solution when there may be better ways of doing what 
they want without writing a regular expression.

What do you really want to do?