Ignore spaces and punctuation for VAT number using Regex

Question

I'm a newbie at regex and I'm trying to ignore spaces and punctuation when validating the format of a VAT number.

I have this regular expression: ^BE[0-9]{10,10}$

It works for this: BE1234567890

But I need it to work for these too:

• BE 1234567890
• BE 123.456.7890
• BE:1234567890
• etc.

How can I get the Regex to ignore whitespaces and punctuation that I define?

Answer 1

BE(\s?|:)(\d{10}|\d{3}.\d{3}.\d{3,4})

this is for EXCACTLY your given examples. Note that you might match more digits in the last \d{3,4} to fulfill your needs

Answer 2

A better idea would be just to strip all spaces and punctuation beforehand, then validate the stripped string with your regex.

But if you really want to, you can do this:

^BE([[:space:][:punct:]]*[0-9]){10}$

This allows arbitrary spaces/punctuation before each digit.