Regex to identify a Medical Beneficiary Identifier(MBI) in python

Question

So I am trying to create a regex for MBIs (medical beneficiary identifiers) in python and my regexes wont work.

Any example of a MBi is: 1EG4-TE5-MK73

Here is the format to MBIs:

11-Characters
The MBI’s 2nd, 5th, 8th, and 9th characters will always be a letter.
Characters 1, 4, 7, 10, and 11 will always be a number.

I have tried using the following regex but to no avail:

mbi=re.compile(r"[1-9]{1}[^SLOIBZsloibz|^0-9]{1}[^SLOIBZsloibz]{1}[0-9]{1}-?[^SLOIBZsloibz|^0-9]{1}[^SLOIBZsloibz]{1}[0-9]{1}-?[^SLOIBZsloibz|^0-9]{1}[^SLOIBZsloibz|^0-9]{1}[0-9]{1}[0-9]{1}")

Any suggestions?!?!

Your pattern is using `[^SLOIBZsloibz]`, is there a reason for that? (I don't see anything about that in the format conditions) Also note that `{1}` is a meaningless quantifier, best to leave it out entirely, and you can use the case-insensitive flag to avoid having to repeat both lower and upper-case characters — CertainPerformance, Dec 07 '18 at 18:55
What about 3rd and 6th position characters? What can they be? Any character or only any alphanumeric character? And are the hyphens optional? Will they be at fixed position only? — Pushpesh Kumar Rajwanshi, Dec 07 '18 at 18:56
@JamesDavinport your regex seems to be working.check here https://regex101.com/r/zX2uj8/1 — Code Maniac, Dec 07 '18 at 19:29

Pedro Lobito · Accepted Answer · 2018-12-07T20:12:26.463

2

Here is the format to MBIs:

11-Characters

The MBI’s 2nd, 5th, 8th, and 9th characters will always be a letter.

Characters 1, 4, 7, 10, and 11 will always be a number.

There's no mention about the 3rd and 6th characters, but based on your example, you can use a regex like:

\b\d[A-Z]{2}\d-[A-Z]{2}\d-[A-Z]{2}\d{2}\b

Regex Demo

Regex Explanation:

edited Dec 07 '18 at 20:12

answered Dec 07 '18 at 19:29

Pedro Lobito

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Well adding i flag will be a good thing as op said can be any letter.Otherwise a good one :) – Code Maniac Dec 07 '18 at 19:36
Thank you! There are several details about the pattern that were left out by the OP. My answer is based on the provided example - `1EG4-TE5-MK73` - which doesn't include small letters. – Pedro Lobito Dec 07 '18 at 19:37
Well it was just a suggestion mate. – Code Maniac Dec 07 '18 at 19:39

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Dec 07 '18 at 19:15

Ok, so based upon your regex, there were certain things that you tried doing were syntactically not correct. Quantifying through curly braces is not needed when you want it to occur just only once due to which {1} becomes redundant. So I've removed this part from your regex. Second thing in your character set,

[^SLOIBZsloibz|^0-9]

as I can see you want to negate certain alphabets and 0-9 digits. You don't have to apply alternation while you are using character set []. Besides negating those alphabets in your character set, if you also want to negate 0-9 number, you just have to simply put it there and your intended correct character set becomes,

[^SLOIBZsloibz0-9]

After applying these corrections in your regex, your regex becomes this, which is what you needed I guess.

^[1-9][^SLOIBZsloibz0-9][^SLOIBZsloibz][0-9]-?[^SLOIBZsloibz0-9][^SLOIBZsloibz][0-9]-?[^SLOIBZsloibz0-9][^SLOIBZsloibz0-9][0-9][0-9]$

Demo

Let me know if this works fine for you.

i used your code but nothing match. Are you sure that works? Scratch my code, do you know a better way to do this? — James Davinport, Dec 07 '18 at 19:23

score 0 · Answer 3 · edited Nov 25 '20 at 23:31

0

I added in a few \\- so it wouldn't count the hash as a valid alpha-numeric character.

^[1-9][^SLOIBZsloibz0-9][^SLOIBZsloibz][0-9]-?[^SLOIBZsloibz0-9\\-][^SLOIBZsloibz\\-][0-9]-?[^SLOIBZsloibz0-9\\-][^SLOIBZsloibz0-9\\-][0-9][0-9]$

edited Nov 25 '20 at 23:31

Ruli

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answered Nov 25 '20 at 19:30

David Dana

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Regex to identify a Medical Beneficiary Identifier(MBI) in python

3 Answers3