How to allow angular brackets <> without any characters between them using Regex?

Question

How to allow angular brackets <> without any characters/space between them using javax regex?Current pattern is like below:

"^[A-Za-z0-9\\s-_]*[A-Za-z0-9][A-Za-z0-9\\s-_]*$"

Answer 1

Use the | token to create an alternative (match this or that).

^(?:[A-Za-z0-9\s-_]|<>)*[A-Za-z0-9](?:[A-Za-z0-9\s-_]|<>)*$

I changed both the [A-Za-z0-9\s-_]+ at the start and end to (?:[A-Za-z0-9\s-_]|<>)*, which means "match 0 or more times [A-Za-z0-9\s-_] or <>".

[A-Za-z0-9_] can be simplified to \w, so a shorter version of the above would be:

^(?:[\w\s-]|<>)*[A-Za-z0-9](?:[\w\s-]|<>)*$