Some help needed on regex

Ruby
1

I have a very complex regex requirement and need some hand here. I can
do only very basic regex.
I need to do the following

add <symbol f|s i|p|e h|l number >

  1. has to be either of the following strings add , modify
  2. followed by any word composed of string or number
  3. followed by one of the 2 letters f,s
  4. followed by either one or more of the letters i,p,e
  5. followed by of letters followed by number. the letters can be
    either h or l and the number can be decimal or round number.
    for eg. h and/or l

appreciate any help here.

2

well since you can describe it in english alright…

TextualRegexp

3

break it down… these aren’t all exactly to your specs–it’s less
specific, just a start
(I would consider not even using a regular expression here…)

  1. (add|modify)
  2. \S+ (any non-whitespace, not exact)
  3. [fs]
  4. [ipe]
  5. [hl] [.0-9]+

Combined, something like:
(add|modify)\s+\S+\s+[fs]\s+[ipe]\s+[hl]\s+[.0-9]+

Of course, this ignores < and >.

But, oww, my head…
“Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll use
regular expressions.” Now they have two problems.” – Jamie Zawinski