Example

Test a Regex for Ticket IDs Before Cleanup

A regex testing workflow for matching support ticket IDs while rejecting similar strings that should not be changed.

The situation

A team wants to find ticket IDs such as BUG-104 and DOC-221 in copied release notes, but it must not match words such as DEBUG-104 or incomplete IDs.

Sample text

Fixed BUG-104 and DOC-221.
Do not match DEBUG-104.
Ignore BUG- and DOC-abc.

Workflow

1. Paste examples that should match and examples that should fail into the tester.
2. Use a word boundary and explicit prefixes: \b(BUG|DOC)-\d+\b.
3. Review matches and capture groups before applying the pattern elsewhere.
4. Add more negative examples from real notes before using replacement.
5. Retest in the target app if it uses a different regex dialect.

Expected matches

BUG-104
DOC-221

Review checks

• The pattern does not match DEBUG-104 because the prefix is constrained.
• Incomplete or nonnumeric IDs are rejected.
• The same pattern should be tested again in non-JavaScript environments.

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