How to write a regex expression for custom syntax highlighting

Question

I want to write a regex expression that will match the following text:

200502-title-of-something

I would like the expression to match any occurrence of a six digit date followed by a string of text separated by dashes.

I am using this for custom syntax highlighting in a sublime-syntax file (YAML 1.2).

Answer 1

I would like the expression to match any occurrence of a six digit date \d{6}
followed by a string of text [a-zA-Z]+
separated by dashes-.

To summarize:

\b\d{6}(?:-[a-zA-Z]+)+\b

where:

• \b is a word boundary
• - a hyphen
• [a-zA-Z]+ a character class that matches 1 or more letters
• (?:...)+ a non capture group, that may appear 1 or more times

Demo & explanation