Is this the most efficient way to parse the string?

I have a string of the form AU 12345T or AU 12345T1; basically it is of the form alphabet characters(s) followed by a number then ending in a one or two character alpha-numeric string.

I am using the following regular expression to get me the r开发者_运维百科esult:

^[a-z|A-Z]+|[0-9]+|[a-z|A-Z][0-9]?  

Would this be the most efficient way to parse such a string?

So for the example AU 12345T, I want the result to be separated into three tokens: AU, 12345, T; for AU 12345T1 it should be AU, 12345, T1 (since the ending characters can be alpha-numeric and max length is 2)

This should do it:

[A-Za-z]+\s?[0-9]+[A-Za-z0-9]{1,2}?

If you want to separate the strings as you said, put parenthesis around the blocks, like so:

([A-Za-z]+)\s?([0-9]+)([A-Za-z0-9]{1,2}?)

This will have the regex return each group individually.

All this being said, you'll probably want to ensure that the final one/two character alphanumeric string always begins with a letter, or else you'll have no way of separating the second token from the third token.