How to simplify a regex pattern?

Question

I'm here trying to simplify a regex.

What i tried was doing a repetition for the same expression, but when I tried to simplify it using ()*, it does not worked as it does not detect the pattern I want.

These are my regex:

(([\(]\w]{1,3}[\)])\s([\d]{1,3}[\?])([\(][\w]{1,3}[\)])\s[\d]{1,3}[\?]([\(][\w]{1,3}[\)])\s([\d]{1,3}[\?])([\(][\w]{1,3}[\)])\s[\d]{1,3}[\?]([\(][\w]{1,3}[\)])\s[0-9]{1,3}[\?]([\(][\w]{1,3}[\)])\s[\d]{1,3}[\?])

Whole pattern:

3A 1?(1) 2?(2) 3?(a) 4?(4) 5?(a) 6?(ii) 7?
4 6?(1) 7?(2) 8?(a) 9?(4) 10?(a) 11?(ii) 12?  

These are the patterns it will detect:

1?(1) 2?(2) 3?(a) 4?(4) 5?(a) 6?(ii) 7?

The regex will detect ONLY the first LINE without the 3A. How can I do these? The regex already be at it's simplest that is \d+\?(?:\([\da-z]+\))? , and now how can I put it in a way to detect first line only? Thanks guyss.

Answer 1

Maybe, here we can simplify it in another way, if it would be possible. For example, we might have three patterns, which we can capture it using three capturing groups: start, end and middle groups, possibly similar to:

(?:^\w+\s)|(\d\?\(\w+\)\s)|(?:\d+\?$)

RegEx

If this wasn't your desired expression, you can modify/change your expressions in regex101.com, and add or reduce the boundaries that you wish.

RegEx Circuit

You can also visualize your expressions in jex.im:

JavaScript Demo for Capturing Groups

const regex = /(?:^\w+\s)|(\d\?\(\w+\)\s)|(?:\d+\?$)/gm;
const str = `3A 4?(1) 5?(2) 6?(a) 7?(4) 8?(a) 9?(ii) 10?`;
let m;

while ((m = regex.exec(str)) !== null) {
    // This is necessary to avoid infinite loops with zero-width matches
    if (m.index === regex.lastIndex) {
        regex.lastIndex++;
    }
    
    // The result can be accessed through the `m`-variable.
    m.forEach((match, groupIndex) => {
        console.log(`Found match, group ${groupIndex}: ${match}`);
    });
}