I have been trying to make a regular expression for a last name field. The parameters are as follows: The only allowable characters are letters (upper and lower case), a period (.) and a dash (-). In using the ReFind command I had tried: ReFind("[a-zA-Z/-/.]", string but no luck so far. Any suggestions?
Tek-Tips is the largest IT community on the Internet today!
Members share and learn making Tek-Tips Forums the best source of peer-reviewed technical information on the Internet!
-
Congratulations strongm on being selected by the Tek-Tips community for having the most helpful posts in the forums last week. Way to Go!
Regular Expression help 2
- Thread starter prrm333
- Start date
-
2
- #3
TruthInSatire
Programmer
what you did there would evaluate to true as long as you have one of those characters so "M*((*&%^()" would evaluate to true because of the M. you want to look for invalid characters.
ReFind("[^a-zA-Z/-/.]", string)
that says find anything that is NOT a letter - or . so
"M*((*&%^()" would return 2
<cfif refind("[^a-zA-Z/-/.]", string) gt 0>
<cfset error = "You can't do that, block head">
</cfif>
A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.
-Douglas Adams (1952-2001)
ReFind("[^a-zA-Z/-/.]", string)
that says find anything that is NOT a letter - or . so
"M*((*&%^()" would return 2
<cfif refind("[^a-zA-Z/-/.]", string) gt 0>
<cfset error = "You can't do that, block head">
</cfif>
A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.
-Douglas Adams (1952-2001)
TruthInSatire
Programmer
when i said
A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.
-Douglas Adams (1952-2001)
I ment that it would return 1 because "M" is in the first position of the string. it doesn't actually return "true" sorry for the confusion.bombboy said:
A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.
-Douglas Adams (1952-2001)
- Thread starter
- #5
I ended up using the following to get it to work:
<cfif not REFind("[a-zA-Z]*[\.]*[\-]*", string) or
REFind("[[:space:],[:digit:]]", string) or
REFind("[~`!@##\$%\^\&&\*\(\)_\+=\:\;\""\''<<>>\?,/\\{}]", string) or
REFind("\[", string) or REFind("\]", string)>
**** Bad String! ****
<cfelse>
**** Good String! ****
</cfif>
Thanks
<cfif not REFind("[a-zA-Z]*[\.]*[\-]*", string) or
REFind("[[:space:],[:digit:]]", string) or
REFind("[~`!@##\$%\^\&&\*\(\)_\+=\:\;\""\''<<>>\?,/\\{}]", string) or
REFind("\[", string) or REFind("\]", string)>
**** Bad String! ****
<cfelse>
**** Good String! ****
</cfif>
Thanks
sonnysavage
Programmer
I think you'll find this regex pretty slick. It will find ANYTHING that is not on the approved list...
The trick to this is to use the negation (^) operator. This regex will find only the first occurrence of the bad character and then exit. This makes it very efficient. Some good reference for regexes are:
Code:
<!--- Regex tests --->
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" "[URL unfurl="true"]http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">[/URL]
<html xmlns="[URL unfurl="true"]http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"[/URL] xml:lang="en" >
<head>
<title>Regex Test</title>
</head>
<body>
<cfset testList = "JoeSchmoe,Joe Schmoe,joe@schmoe.com,Joe-Schmoe.yo,JoeSchmoe9">
<cfloop list="#testList#" index="testString">
<cfif REFind("[^a-zA-Z\.\-]", testString)>
<cfoutput><p>#testString# is BAD.</p></cfoutput>
<cfelse>
<cfoutput><p>#testString# is GOOD.</p></cfoutput>
</cfif>
</cfloop>
</body>
</html>The trick to this is to use the negation (^) operator. This regex will find only the first occurrence of the bad character and then exit. This makes it very efficient. Some good reference for regexes are:
sonnysavage
Programmer
Hmm... looking back, I see that bombboy already gave the answer:
![[2thumbsup]](/data/assets/smilies/2thumbsup.gif "[2thumbsup] [2thumbsup]")
He simply had put forward slashes (/) instead of backslashes (\). Good job bombboy! I gave you a star.bombboy said:
TruthInSatire
Programmer
oh crap i did didn't I? I just copied the existing expression and added the ^ should have paid more attention.
A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.
-Douglas Adams (1952-2001)
A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.
-Douglas Adams (1952-2001)
so according to the regexp this is completely valid
....---MY-name---HE-..-rE...--
prrm333 : Do you have any other constraint in the field? Can they enter as many periods or dashes as they want?
If you don't have something already defined, then I think you should come up with some kind of standard.
grtfercho çB^]\..
"Imagination is more important than Knowledge" A. Einstein
-----------------------------------------------
....---MY-name---HE-..-rE...--
prrm333 : Do you have any other constraint in the field? Can they enter as many periods or dashes as they want?
If you don't have something already defined, then I think you should come up with some kind of standard.
grtfercho çB^]\..
"Imagination is more important than Knowledge" A. Einstein
-----------------------------------------------
TruthInSatire
Programmer
he's probably right. I'm sure you'll never get someone with a name like that... or a big enough turd to do something like that but maybe limit it to one or two so you can still get names like "smith-jones .jr" ... if you're a guy with a hyphenated name 
A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.
-Douglas Adams (1952-2001)
A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.
-Douglas Adams (1952-2001)
- Status