Validating Credit Card Numbers

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    Love this challenge ! It was very fast for me to check the 5 first conditions in regex, but so complex to check the "Not 4 or more consecutive repeated digits" condition.

    For those who come after, I think that a good tip is to create 2 regex patterns. Instead of doing 1 big pattern.

    In my logic, I check all conditions except the first one. Because if already one of them is not valid, I can print "Invalid".

    But if all conditions are valid, then I check the consecutive repeated digit condition.

    For that, I firstly remove "-" if necessary, because it's obviously most complex if not.

    Then I use the regex pattern "([0-9])\1{3,}".

    I didn't know the "back reference" in regex (\1, \2 etc...).

    \1 means : "re-use the last group"

    So ([0-9])\1 means : I capture a digit. And I want this exact same digit after.

    Obviously, by adding {3,} we want that this logic is applied 3 times or more.

    And if this condition is True, it's Invalid, because we don't want to have 4 consecutives repeated digits.

    Note: Be careful to use re.search() and not re.match() for this pattern. Because re.match() only search at the start, whereas re.search() search everywhere in the string.

    Here my code :

    import re
    
    N = int(input())
    
    pattern = r"(^([456])([0-9]{3})-([0-9]{4})-([0-9]{4})-([0-9]{4})$)|(^([456])([0-9]{15})$)"
    # Easier to have a second regex pattern only for the repeated consecutive digit condition
    pattern_repeated_digit = r"([0-9])\1{3,}"
    
    for _ in range(N):
        current_credit_card = input()
    
        if bool(re.match(pattern, current_credit_card)):
            
            # Now that we have check all conditions except repeated digits, we will check this last condition. Before, we have to remove '-'. However, it will be too complex.
            if '-' in current_credit_card:
                current_credit_card = current_credit_card.replace('-', '')
            
            # If there is consecutive repeated digit : Invalid. Else : Valid.
            if bool(re.search(pattern_repeated_digit, current_credit_card)):
                print("Invalid")
            else:
                print("Valid")
        else:
            print("Invalid")