As you're not being clear on what you wanted, I'm just guessing this is
what you wanted:
'123456'- Hide quoted text -
- Show quoted text -
Sorry I wasn't more clear. I positively appreciate your reply. It
provides half of what I'm hoping to learn. The hash character is
actually a desirable hook to identify a data entity in a scraping
routine I'm developing, but not a character I want in the scrubbed
data.
In my application, the hash makes a string of alphanumeric characters
unique from other alphanumeric strings. The strings I'm looking for
are actually manually-entered identifiers, but a real machine-created
identifier shouldn't contain that hash character. The correct pattern
should be 'A1234509', but is instead often merely entered as '#12345'
when the first character, representing an alphabet sequence for the
month, and the last two characters, representing a two-digit year, can
be assumed. Identifying the hash character in a RegEx match is a way
of trapping the string and transforming it into its correct machine-
generated form.
Other patterns the strings can take in their manually-created
form:
A#12345
#1234509
Garbage in, garbage out -- I know. I wish I could tell the people
entering the data how challenging it is to work with what they
provide, but it is, after all, a screen-scraping routine.
I'm surprised it's been so difficult to find an example of the hash
character in a RegEx string -- for exactly this type of situation,
since it's so common in the real world that people want to put a pound
symbol in front of a number.
Thanks!