match the same unknown character multiple times

Question

I have a regex problem I can\'t seem to solve. I actually don\'t know if regex can do this, but I need to match a range of characters n times at the end of a pattern. eg. bl

Answer 1

In most regex implementations, you can accomplish this by referencing a capture group in your regex. For your example, you can use the following to match the same uppercase character five times:

blahblah([A-Z])\1{4}

Note that to match the regex n times, you need to use \1{n-1} since one match will come from the capture group.