Java REGEX to match an exact number of digits in a string

Question

I tried to find the answer to my problem in the questions history but they just come back in more than one thousand and after scanning through a few tens of matching answers

Answer 1

The first occurrence of 6 digits in the string you posted is actually 987654. If you mean the first occurrence of 6 digits surrounded by characters that are not digits, then this should work:

(?

EDIT: This approach uses a negative lookbehind and a negative lookahead. It's slightly different than the word boundary approach in that it will match 123456 in the following strings

123456asdf some text hello

another string a123456 aaaaaaaa

If the numbers will always be surrounded by spaces then the word boundary approach is probably better.