I am new to regex and I have a confusing problem with regards to this scenario where I have a list of items with their weight and unit. I need to abbreviate the item and the weight however my regex broke when there is a negative number. Here is my current regex:

[.0-9] -\.?[0-9.]*

And here is my example case that is working

Lenovo Legion 5-15 lbs 

I was able to match 5-15 and that is correct however when I have a value like

DELL XPS -2 lbs

My regex broke. How can I modify my regex to accommodate the negative value?

CodePudding user response：

You can use

-?\d (?:\.\d )?(?:-\d (?:\.\d )?)?

See the regex demo

Details:

• -? - an optional -
• \d (?:\.\d )? - one or more digits and then an optional occurrence of a . and one or more digits
• (?:-\d (?:\.\d )?)? - an optional occurrence of
  • - - a hyphen
  • \d (?:\.\d )? - one or more digits and then an optional occurrence of a . and one or more digits