Need a regular expression to match a substring n times [closed]

Question

The regex .*{n} will match any single character n times, but I need to match any single substring n times.

How do I do that?

Answer 1

To match the substring "foo" 3 times (for example "foofoofoo"), you could use the following:

(foo){3}

Or with a non-capturing group:

(?:foo){3}

As a side note, .*{n} wouldn't do what you think it does. The . will match any character, .* will match any number of any characters, and .*{n} will vary depending on the implementation but it will either be an invalid regex, be equivalent to .*, or match any number of any characters followed by the literal string '{n}'.

Answer 2

Try

(your sub string here){n}

e.g.

(cats){4}