A positive number from 1 to 2^31 -1 in regex

Question

I got the following regex that almost does the work but does not exclude zero ...How to do that?

^(\d|\d{1,9}|1\d{1,9}|20\d{8}|213\d{7}|2146\d{6}|21473\d{5}|214747\d{4}|2147482\d{3}|21474835\d{2}|214748364[0-7])$

Also can anybody explain a bit how this works?

Answer 1

Regular expressions are not the right tool for this job. A much better solution is to extract the integer from your string (you can use a regex for this, just \d+), then convert that to an integer, then check the integer against your desired range.

An important corollary is to never blindly use a regular expression (or any code, really) that you don't understand yourself. What would you do if you used the regular expression above, then a requirement came in to modify the acceptable range?