Examples of regular expressions
The following examples walk you through creating regular expressions for several different formats.
MAC addresses
Media Access Control (MAC) is a unique identifier for network interfaces with 6-byte fields normally written in hexadecimal.
ipconfig
with the /all
switch parameter can show the MAC address of each interface. The address is written in hexadecimal, and each byte is separated by a hyphen, for example, 1a-2b-3c-4d-5f-6d
.
On Linux or Unix-based systems, the ip address
command shows the hardware (MAC) address for interfaces. Each hexadecimal byte is separated by a :
, such as 1a:2b:3c:4d:5f:6d
.
A regular expression can be created to simultaneously match these formats. The expression matches the output from the ipconfig /all
command on Windows and the ip address
command on Linux. In both cases, the MAC address appears after a space at the end of a line.
Considering the preceding formats, the MAC address is made up of...