Please advise on PB support of Regular Expressions

[Geser]

I an trying to create a code which would be used to validate data entered to be a plausible social security number - and so far I have been unable to come up with the code for it in PowerBuilder. Any assistance is appreciated. Thanks!

 

[mbalent]

How do you define a plausible number? based on the number of digits? some sort of check sum?

Matt

"Nature forges everything on the anvil of time

 

[Geser]

Thanks for your reply!. Plausible SS number is defined as ###-##-#### (3 digits, followed by dash, followed by 2 digits, followed by dash, followed by 4 digits). Thanks!

 

[mbalent]

Well if you are storing this number, you probably won't want to store the dashes. In the itemchanged event of your datawindow (assuming you are using a datawindow) make sure the data entered has a length of 9.

IF (Len(data) <> 9) THEN
   //error condition
END IF

If you are using an Editmask control in the Losefocus event

IF (Len(this.text) <> 9) AND (Len(this.text) > 0) THEN
   //error condition
END IF

You can set up an edit mask on the display of the field to show the dashes to the user (i.e., ###-##-####).

Matt

"Nature forges everything on the anvil of time

 

[aschi666]

hey geser!

pb doesn't support regex,there's just a simple dialect which can be used with the match() function.
however this should really be ok for the purpose, it returns true for any string matching exactly your SS#:

Match(/*string str_var*/, &
"^([0-9][0-9][0-9]-[0-9][0-9]-[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9])$")

for regexes in pb check perllib which can be used to easily integrate perl in pb-code. but you won't need that here truely

__________________________________________
a programmer is a tool that converts coffee into code...
aschi666, sthcomputing.de

 

[aschi666]

... but matt's approach is totaly correct too. you can use match() in code and the edit mask control to check what the user entered.

tell us if we helped you!

__________________________________________
a programmer is a tool that converts coffee into code...
aschi666, sthcomputing.de