I am trying to match a string that start with the set word "hotel", then a hyphen, then a word of any length, then another hyphen and finally a number of any length.
Edit: Dima gave the solution I needed in the comments of this question! Thanks Dima.
Further edit: elaborating on Dima's answer, adding capturing groups making it easier to retrieve the information entered, and correcting the last bit to only accept digits:
^hotel-(.+)-(\d+)
^hotel-(.)*$
(But hotel-something WILL work, according to your initial statement).
So, if you actually want something like:
hotel-XXXXXX-YYYYYYY
Then the regex is :
^hotel-(.)*-(.)*$
Try a regex online tester like http://www.regextester.com/.
If you want to match the start of the input, you use ^.
so if you have ^hotel-\b, that will force hotel to be at the start of the string.
as a note, you can use $ for the end of the string in a similar way.
\bhotel-[^\s-]+-[^\s-]+\b
\b means that it should be a word boundery
[^\s-] means anything but - or whitespace
^hotel-.+-.+or equivalently `^hotel(-.+){2,}