Replace everything but number and >actual< decimal points

Question

I'm trying to get a regex working that will replace everything except for numbers and a decimal point (easy). The tricky part: the decimal point is optional but, if present, must be trailed by a further number.

So:

.10 => 10
10. => 10
10.- => 10
1.0 => 1.0

I'm not quite sure how to define the "except numbers followed by an optional decimal point but mandatory number after the optional decimal point" bit :)

Thanks!

Regexes are fun! But I would strongly recommend spending an hour or two studying the basics. For starters, you need to learn which characters are special: "metacharacters" which need to be escaped (i.e. with a backslash placed in front - and the rules are different inside and outside character classes.) There is an excellent online tutorial at: www.regular-expressions.info. The time you spend there will pay for itself many times over. Happy regexing! — ridgerunner
Thanks for your comment. Regex is actually not new to me at all, I'm usually quite comfortable with regex but I've gotten rusty and I always have trouble with negated patterns for replace statements. Cheers — Christof

UncleZeiv UncleZeiv · Accepted Answer · 2011-04-14T14:37:27

It would be something like this:

\d+(\.\d+)?

(Please note that the regex syntax you are using may require different escaping.)

Replace everything but number and >actual< decimal points

1 Answers