Regular expression to match any chemical element

Here's a frivolous exercise in regular expressions: Write a regex to match any chemical element symbol.

Here's one solution.

A[cglmrstu]|B[aehikr]?|C[adeflmnorsu]?|D[bsy]|E[rsu]|F[elmr]?|G[ade]|H[efgos]?|I[nr]?|Kr?|L[airuv]|M[dgnot]|N[abdeiop]?|Os?|P[abdmortu]?|R[abefghnu]|S[bcegimnr]?|T[abcehilm]|U(u[opst])?|V|W|Xe|Yb?|Z[nr]

Making it more readable

Here's the same expression in more readable form:

/A[cglmrstu] | B[aehikr]? | C[adeflmnorsu]? | D[bsy] | E[rsu] | F[elmr]? | G[ade] | H[efgos]? | I[nr]? | Kr? | L[airuv] | M[dgnot] | N[abdeiop]? | Os? | P[abdmortu]? | R[abefghnu] | S[bcegimnr]? | T[abcehilm] | U(u[opst])? | V | W | Xe | Yb? | Z[nr]/x

The /x option in Perl says to ignore white space. Other regular expression implementations have something similar. Python has two such options, X for similarity with Perl, and VERBOSE for readability. Both have the same behavior.

Regex syntax

The regular expression says that a chemical element symbol may start with A, followed by c, g, l, m, r, s, t, or u; or a B, optionally followed by a, e, h, i, k, or r; or "

The most complicated part of the regex is the part for symbols starting with U. There's Uranium whose symbols is simply U, and there are the elements who have temporary names based on their atomic numbers: Ununtrium, Ununpentium, Ununseptium, and Ununoctium. These are just Latin for one-one-three, one-one-five, one-one-seven, and one-one-eight. The symbols are U, Uut, Uup, Uus, and Uuo. The regex U(u[opst])? can be read "U, optionally followed by u and one of o, p, s, or t."

Note that the regex will match any string that contains a chemical element symbol, but it could match more. For example, it would match "I've never been to Boston in the fall" because that string contains B, the symbol for boron. Exercise: Modify the regex to only match chemical element symbols.

Regex golf

There may be clever ways to use fewer characters at the cost of being more obfuscated. But this is for fun anyway, so we'll indulge in a little regex golf.

There are five elements whose symbols start with I or Z: I, In, Ir, Zn, and Zr. You could write [IZ][nr] to match four of these. The regex I|[IZ][nr] would represent all five with 10 characters, while I[nr]?|Z[nr] uses 12. Two characters saved! Can you cut out any more?

Regex resources

• Notes on regular expressions in Python, PowerShell, R, Mathematica, and C++
• Twitter account with daily regex tips