regular expression to find if a string contains all the characters of another string

Question

Hi

I need a regular expression to find if a string contains all the characters of another string.

Can anyone help me with this please?

I believe I've worked out the correct expression.

HERE IS THE ANSWER:

REPEAT .*[a,b,c]{1} as many times as the number of characters in the 2nd string and also replace [a,b,c] in the square bracket with all characters in the 2nd string.

Answer 1

Nope.  First, the syntax is wrong.  Second, matching .* will match anything.  Third, there are no commas in the [abc] part.  Fourth, even if you got this to work:

[abc][abc][abc][abc]  This matches aaaa, which doesn't have all the characters of abc.  So you're on the wrong track.

And finally, I don't believe you can write a regular expression to do such a thing.

Answer 2

Hi SqlLearning,

Thank you for sharing your solution.

I believe I've worked out the correct expression.

HERE IS THE ANSWER:

REPEAT .*[a,b,c]{1} as many times as the number of characters in the 2nd string and also replace [a,b,c] in the square bracket with all characters in the 2nd string.

Best regards,

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Mike Feng
MSDN Community Support | Feedback to us
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Answer 3

I don't believe your regex will work since for example, your regex  ".*[a,b,c]{1}" will match "Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party"

You can certainly use a regex to pare your first string down to just a list of the unique letters in the string, by removing duplicates.  I also chose to remove <spaces>:

(you need to set the SingleLine option so that dot matches newline)
(\S)(?=.*?\1)|\s

Once you have that list, you could iterate through the list one by one, checking to see that it exists in the second string.

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Ron