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Find the shortest regex that matches all non-radioactive elements and nothing else in the Periodic Table of Elements. This is the inverse of Regex for Finding Radioactive Elements

Radioactive Elements

'Technetium','Promethium','Polonium','Astatine','Radon','Francium','Radium','Actinium','Thorium','Protactinium','Uranium','Neptunium','Plutonium','Americium','Curium','Berkelium','Californium','Einsteinium','Fermium','Mendelevium','Nobelium','Lawrencium','Rutherfordium','Dubnium','Seaborgium','Bohrium','Hassium','Meitnerium','Darmstadtium','Roentgenium','Copernicium','Ununtrium','Flerovium','Ununpentium','Livermorium','Ununseptium','Ununoctium'

Non-radioactive Elements

'Hydrogen','Helium','Lithium','Beryllium','Boron','Carbon','Nitrogen','Oxygen','Fluorine','Neon','Sodium','Magnesium','Aluminium','Silicon','Phosphorus','Sulphur','Chlorine','Argon','Potassium','Calcium','Scandium','Titanium','Vanadium','Chromium','Manganese','Iron','Cobalt','Nickel','Copper','Zinc','Gallium','Germanium','Arsenic','Selenium','Bromine','Krypton','Rubidium','Strontium','Yttrium','Zirconium','Niobium','Molybdenum','Ruthenium','Rhodium','Palladium','Silver','Cadmium','Indium','Tin','Antimony','Tellurium','Iodine','Xenon','Caesium','Barium','Lanthanum','Cerium','Praseodymium','Neodymium','Samarium','Europium','Gadolinium','Terbium','Dysprosium','Holmium','Erbium','Thulium','Ytterbium','Lutetium','Hafnium','Tantalum','Tungsten','Rhenium','Osmium','Iridium','Platinum','Gold','Mercury','Thallium','Lead','Bismuth'
  • Scored by character count in the regex.
  • Use standard Perl regex (just no specialized functions).
  • Assume all lower case.
  • You only need to count the characters of the regex itself.

Note if you used a program to get you started and maybe post how well it did. I'll post my best attempt as an answer to get started/show an example.

Edit: Apparently Bismuth is radioactive, but since I'm assuming the universe would die from heat death before it was ever much of a problem I'm not going to worry about it now.

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    \$\begingroup\$ Nitpick: Bismuth is technically radioactive, although its decay rate is so vanishingly low that it can be treated as stable for all practical purposes. \$\endgroup\$
    – Ilmari Karonen
    Jan 10, 2014 at 1:24
  • \$\begingroup\$ @IlmariKaronen Interesting didn't know that. I copied the lists from the internet and you know how reliable that is ;). \$\endgroup\$
    – qw3n
    Jan 10, 2014 at 1:47
  • \$\begingroup\$ I don't think the question is well specified. My understanding of "the shortest regex that matches all non-radioactive elements and nothing else" is that the string "y" shouldn't match since "y" isn't the name of a non-radioactive element; but both the solutions currently posted match "y"; effectively they do substring matches. My understanding of the question would be that the answer should be the shortest string representing a regular expression that is equivalent to the regular expression 'Hydrogen|Helium|...|Bismuth' (ie. the RE formed by joining the names of all non-radioactive elements w \$\endgroup\$
    – user14344
    Jan 10, 2014 at 2:47
  • \$\begingroup\$ In addition to your other question, I also ran this through Peter Norvig's Regex Golf solver, but it spat out a 99 character solution. Sometimes humans come out on top. \$\endgroup\$
    – EMBLEM
    Mar 7, 2015 at 23:13

3 Answers 3

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Character count 94

y|^v|h.[lfdn]|^t[^eh]|[^te]i[rodnts]|[lp].t[^o]|ru?[bs]|ll|^..ro|^[^r][^u].{1,4}$|ca..i|ma|s.l
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  • \$\begingroup\$ What language is this? \$\endgroup\$
    – Timtech
    Jan 8, 2014 at 22:17
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    \$\begingroup\$ @Timtech javascript's regex \$\endgroup\$
    – qw3n
    Jan 8, 2014 at 22:34
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I was tempted (and am still debating internally) to vote to close this as a duplicate of your other regex golf question on the basis that the optimal solutions are within a constant of each other, as witness:

70 chars

^(?!no|c?u|ra|.*(e.[kht]|[^l][gecv]i|[^c]oh?[rn]iu|f.r|ac|sta|bn|has))
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  • \$\begingroup\$ I see your point, and in the back of my mind I had thought of this. What if there was the restriction it needed to be solved without using a global not? \$\endgroup\$
    – qw3n
    Jan 10, 2014 at 16:51
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    \$\begingroup\$ @qw3n, that has two problems. Firstly, as a general rule if you need to prohibit the best option it indicates a weakness in the question. Secondly, it could potentially kill a better solution which casts a fairly wide net and needs to exclude a couple of cases. \$\endgroup\$
    – Peter Taylor
    Jan 10, 2014 at 17:00
  • \$\begingroup\$ When solving the general problem I went from both directions to see what the results would be. This regex was unique from the other and a unique challenge to create, but yes it ignores the fact you can use the shorter regex by adding not. But that was the reason I posted both. I thought it would be a unique challenge from the other one. \$\endgroup\$
    – qw3n
    Jan 10, 2014 at 17:15
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Small improvement on qw3n's solution (93 characters):

y|^v|h.[lfdn]|[^te]i[rodnts]|[lp].t[^o]|ru?[bs]|ll|^..ro|^[^r][^u].{1,4}$|ca..i|ma|s.l|tan|gs

Basically got rid of ^t[^eh] (7 characters) clause and replaced with tan|gs (6 characters). Also I count qw3n's solution as 94 characters, not 95.

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