How do I use a regular expression to match any string, but at least 3 characters?

This is python regex, but it probably works in other languages that implement it, too.

I guess it depends on what you consider a character to be. If it’s letters, numbers, and underscores:

\w{3,}

if just letters and digits:

[a-zA-Z0-9]{3,}

Python also has a regex method to return all matches from a string.

>>> import re
>>> re.findall(r'\w{3,}', 'This is a long string, yes it is.')
['This', 'long', 'string', 'yes']