I’m working on a Flutter app where I need to parse time duration strings that come in a specific format. I have strings like 4h 15m that represent work hours logged in my application.
I want to use regular expressions to extract the hour and minute values from these formatted strings. The format is always the same - it has a number followed by ‘h’ for hours, then a space, then another number followed by ‘m’ for minutes.
What would be the best RegEx pattern to capture both the hour and minute values separately so I can use them in my Flutter calculations? I need to be able to handle different numbers like 2h 45m, 8h 0m, or 12h 30m.
The pattern r'(\d+)h (\d+)m' works perfectly. I built something similar last year for a project tracker. I wrapped the regex in a simple method that returns a Map with the extracted values - something like Map<String, int> parseTimeString(String input) using RegExp.allMatches() and converting the captured groups to integers directly. Saved me from scattering string-to-int conversion all over the codebase. Just heads up - this pattern assumes your input’s always well-formed, so you might need validation depending on how reliable your data source is.
skip regex - it’s overkill. use split() instead: var parts = timeStr.split(' '); var hours = int.parse(parts[0].replaceAll('h', '')); var mins = int.parse(parts[1].replaceAll('m', '')); way simpler and faster for basic formats like this.
Had this exact problem a few months ago building a timesheet tracker. This regex worked perfectly: /(\d+)h (\d+)m/ - you need the double backslashes in Dart strings for proper escaping. Use it like: RegExp r = RegExp(r'(\d+)h (\d+)m'); then r.firstMatch(yourString) to get the match. First capture group = hours, second = minutes. Don’t forget to check for null if your input doesn’t match the format. Been rock solid in production handling thousands of entries daily.
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