Help with regex in Importer

[e-zaline]

Hello, sorry for this basic question, but I want to filter with regex in my SpineToolbox importer.
I want to keep only strings that have two letters + "NG" (e.g. XXNGXX, LYNGCC_Misurata_CC, etc...), and filter out the other strings, for instance strings like XXXNG (i.e. more than two letters before NG).

I thought this was the way (it's what I understood from wikipedia)
"[A-Za-z][A-Za-z]NG"

But this does not filter out the XXXXNG.

What would be the correct way in SpineToolbox?

[soininen]

Regular expression are very powerful but oftentimes complicated to get right. "[A-Za-z][A-Za-z]NG" matches strings like XXXXNG because it still contains the pattern XXNG in the middle. What you need is a little token ^ that matches the beginning of a string: ^[A-Za-z][A-Za-z]NG

There are handy pages like this that you can use to build and test your regular expressions.

[e-zaline]

Thank you for the quick reply Antti! 👍