Regex - Find Consecutive Uppercase Characters

Sylvester Bullitt

I’m trying to create a regex to find consecutive upper case characters. My test input strings:

No Consecutive Uppercase Characters
CoNSecutive Uppercase Characters

My regex attempts (these all give false positives):

[:upper:]{2}
[[:upper:]]{2}
([:upper:]){2}

What am I doing wrong?

Alan Kilborn

@Sylvester-Bullitt

I’d try: (?-i)\u\u

Coises

@Sylvester-Bullitt said in Regex - Find Consecutive Uppercase Characters:

I’m trying to create a regex to find consecutive upper case characters. My test input strings:

No Consecutive Uppercase Characters
CoNSecutive Uppercase Characters

My regex attempts (these all give false positives):

[:upper:]{2}
[[:upper:]]{2}
([:upper:]){2}

What am I doing wrong?

Most likely you neglected to check Match case in the Find dialog.

Aside from that, your second try, [[:upper:]]{2}, is correct. The others won’t do what you expect.

mkupper

@Coises said in Regex - Find Consecutive Uppercase Characters:

Aside from that, your second try, [[:upper:]]{2}, is correct. The others won’t do what you expect.

Sadly, that does not work unless you also enable case-sensitive mode using (?-i)[[:upper:]]{2}

You would think that searching for \u, \l, [[:upper:]] or [[:lower:]] would clue the regular expression engine into that the user desires a case sensitive match. I assume the deep thinkers behind regular expressions have a good reason for why those are not automatically case-sensitive matches without extra work.

Sylvester Bullitt

@Alan-Kilborn You’re right. That did the trick. Seems counter-intuitive, as if we have to tell NPP about case twice. But I can’t argue with success. Thanks for the assist!

Coises

@mkupper said in Regex - Find Consecutive Uppercase Characters:

Sadly, that does not work unless you also enable case-sensitive mode using (?-i)[[:upper:]]{2}

That’s strange. I double-checked again after reading your message: with Match case checked I definitely get correct results using [[:upper:]]{2} without the (?-i) prefix.

Tested on Notepad++ v8.5.7 (64-bit) and v8.4.8 (32-bit).

Alan Kilborn

@Coises said in Regex - Find Consecutive Uppercase Characters:

That’s strange. I double-checked again after reading your message: with Match case checked I definitely get correct results using [[:upper:]]{2} without the (?-i) prefix.

I’d guess that @mkupper didn’t notice the “Most likely you neglected to check Match case in the Find dialog” comment above your regex in your previous post.