regular expression-- needed help

tengtium · September 5th, 2009, 03:22 AM

i have this: ^(?!.*--)[A-Za-z\d-]+$
it accepts alphanumeric characters, optionally with single dash only and it does not accepts space.

now i need it to accept space for example:
ab34 12435, ab34- 12435 is valid.
ab34 12435, ab34- 12435 is invalid.

never mind the space before and end of the example.. i can trim that before i validate it to my problem regular expression

any help please

Old Pedant · September 5th, 2009, 04:33 PM

I'm sorry, but I can't see *ANY* difference between you valid and invalid examples.

I even used "view==>>source" to see your post, in case the forum was "eating" some characters, and they are identical. Thus:

Code:

ab34 12435, ab34- 12435 is valid. <br />
ab34 12435, ab34- 12435 is invalid.<br />

Try again??

tengtium · September 5th, 2009, 08:58 PM

it needs to accept alphanumeric with optionally a non-consecutive dash and optionally a non-consecutive space.

it accepts:
12a-3c-4f3fg
12ertgg2
1-2-3-3-4-3
dffgsfg
d-f-f-g-s-f-g

it does not accept:
12-3c-4f&3fg
12e%rt-gg2
d--f-f-g-s-f-g
1-2-3-3-4--3

Old Pedant · September 6th, 2009, 03:51 PM

Wish you had given more *different* examples.

Non-consecutive dash or space, okay. But what about dash followed by space or vice versa?
And can the sequence begin or end with a dash or space??

Code:

a1 -b2
c3- d4
-e5-f6
g7-h8-

Are any/all of those valid???

Anyway...assuming that *NONE* of those are legal:

Code:

/^([a-z0-9]+[ \-])*[a-z0-9]+$/i

I think that does it. That's JavaScript regexp notation.

You see it?

Code:

/^ === start
([a-z0-9]+[ \-])* === zero or more of
     [a-z0-9]+  === one or more alphanums
     [ \-]  === followed by either space or dash
[a-z0-9]+  === ending with one or more alphanums
$  === end 
/i  === ignore case of alphas

tengtium · September 6th, 2009, 09:39 PM

thank you sooooo much sir. i really appreciate it..