mash:Please read the Posting Guidelines and provide as much of the requested information as possible. Thanks.   Hi, Michael, can you pls post those guidelines, I cannot see them ;-) and what's up with this sudden avalanche of posts today? smth moved deep down? Sergei Z   

as always, a picture is better than 1000 words: can you send an example of test data that shoud be cleaned from those 30+ chars strings. Even better, if you could send us a sample that has *bad* and *good* strings mixed up. And show in bold which ones need to be deleted.

try ^\w{2} if you use .NET flavour of regex, then use (?m)^\w{2}

in my opinion, you are trying to do too much with one regular expression. Instead, you can build a small app, parser that would get the needed strings from the a fields' list. Breaking your logic in a few manageable steps will save you time and allow for easy debugging.

I posted almost 3000 posts here over 7 years and had  trouble with the interface maybe a handful of times. The bigger problem is that for some reason people stopped going to this forum anymore, and I'm not sure it's related to UI troubles. Someone told me that it has to do with how Google finds the site.

what is your regex flavor? I can try to help with .NET and Oracle if you happen to write in those flavors.  

try ^\d{1,2}(,\d{1,2})*$

some people in this forum can find you alias offensive. just a fyi.

u need to more clearly define what *text* means. The best way is to define all the characters you consider to be *text*. also pls state the regex tool you are planning to use for this task.

try to wrap your regex in ^.......$        - start and end of the line   grep ^[0-9]\{8\}$