RegEx - Match Numbers of Variable Length

Question

I\'m trying to parse a document that has reference numbers littered throughout it.

Text text text {4:2} more incredible text {4:3} much later on {22

Answer 1

You can specify how many times you want the previous item to match by using {min,max}.

{[0-9]{1,3}:[0-9]{1,3}}

Also, you can use \d for digits instead of [0-9] for most regex flavors:

{\d{1,3}:\d{1,3}}

You may also want to consider escaping the outer { and }, just to make it clear that they are not part of a repetition definition.