A string contains only [A-Za-z0-9] characters. I need to know if the tested string contains at least one repeating character.
The following should return false:
abc1
abc
The following should return true:
abc11
1abc1
aabc1
abca
Can be done with:
^.*?(\w)\1.*?$
See a demo on regex101.com (actually, following matches as well).
If you don't mind that the character class [A-Za-z0-9] can contain _ as well, \w is a shortcut for [A-Za-z0-9_]. Afterwards, the whole expression is bound to the start (^) and end ($) of a line/string. Last but not least, the lazy .*? matches anything before and after, the (\w)\1 at least one repeating character.
If you do mind about the _, leave it as [A-Za-z0-9]:
^.*?([A-Za-z0-9])\1.*?$
Thinking about it, I have misread your question. This approach will match words like aabc or abbc but not 1abc1 as required in your question. Use a positive lookahead for this as proposed by @Pranav. Although this does not answer the question someone might be interested in this very solution so I tend to leave the answer.
Like @Jan I didn't pay attention to question closely. So @Pranav answer is working and is accepted but it has multiple unnecessary greedy dots. I'll reduce it to:
/(?=^[a-z0-9]+$)(.)+?.*\1/im
Or just .*?(.).*?\1.* if you know already is [A-Za-z0-9].
For only check if matches (.).*?\1
If you find the character set restriction too limiting, use this:
function isNotUnique(inputString) {
return !(inputString === [...new Set(inputString)].join(''));
}
It doesn't use regular expressions, but, handles most/all? characters as it relies on Set to enforce uniqueness. Example with Unicode:
let inputs = ['abc1', 'abc', 'abc11', '1abc1', 'aabc1', '☃☃', '☃', '☃abc', '(ฺ◣д◢)ฺ', '(ฺ◣д◢)'];
inputs.forEach(v => console.log(v + ': ' + isNotUnique(v)));
Outputs:
abc1: false
abc: false
abc11: true
1abc1: true
aabc1: true
☃☃: true
☃: false
☃abc: false
(ฺ◣д◢)ฺ: true
(ฺ◣д◢): false