why is this regex not working?

Question

I have this regex [\\p{L}]+([\\p{L}]|[\\d])+([ ]?[\\p{L}]+([\\p{L}]|[\\d])+)? the idea is to recognize at least 2 words with a space between them that each of the words has at least 2 letters.

for some reason it recognize "aa"

any idea what am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

Try removing both of '?'.

Answer 2

@shahar , you could try the regex string "^([a-zA-Z]{2,}[\\s[a-zA-Z]]*)+$" to validate a string at least contains two words and every word at least contains two character.

Based on my test, you can refer to the following code to validate the string.

Code:

  var regex = "^([a-zA-Z]{2,}[\\s[a-zA-Z]]*)+$";  
            string[] arr = { "aa", "a goog boy", "an email", "the test email" };  
            foreach (var item in arr)  
            {  
                Match ma= Regex.Match(item, regex, RegexOptions.IgnoreCase);  
                Console.WriteLine(item +" ***** "+ma.Success);  
            }  

Note: {2,} shows that a word must at least two characters. [\\s[a-zA-Z]] indicates that one or more spaces followed by letters.
Result:

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