CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpregex
Matt
Matt

Reputation: 45

Make whole input string match the regex

I have the following regex:

/[0-9#%@_$&!?^\/|*<>]+/i

which is not supposed to accept letters. It does accept letters when letters are not entered at the first place.

e.g.: it finds a match if I enter "123e" (but should not because there is a letter)

What is the problem in my regex?

Thanks

Upvotes: 3

Views: 70

Answers (5)

Tudor Constantin
Tudor Constantin

Reputation: 26861

try by simply negating the character class that represents all letters:

/[^a-z^A-Z]+/

Upvotes: 0

Mat
Mat

Reputation: 206689

If you want the whole string to contain only the characters you specified in the regex, you'll need to anchor it:

/^[0-9#%@_$&!?^\/|*<>]+$/i

Otherwise, it looks for the specified character class anywhere in the string: as long as there is at least one of those in it, the regex would match.

Upvotes: 2

Pascal MARTIN
Pascal MARTIN

Reputation: 400932

Your regex checks if there is one or more of the list characters you specified -- and that's true for 123e.

It doesn't check if the string contains only those.


You might want to edit your regex, so it looks like this :

/^[0-9#%@_$&!?^/|*<>]+$/i

Where I've added the two following anchors :

  • ^ indicating "beginning of string / line"
  • $ indicating "end of string / line"

Which means the regex will check if your string starts with one of your characters, end with one of those, and contains those.

Upvotes: 2

alex
alex

Reputation: 490153

Use start and end anchors...

/^[\d#%@_$&!?^/|*<>]+\z/i

^ means the start of the string and \z means the end of the string. The commonly used $ for the end of the string will allow a trailing \n. This is not always appropriate.

Upvotes: 2

Kimi
Kimi

Reputation: 6279

Start the regex with ^ and end it with $. That will make it exclusive.

^ stands for beginning of the line.

$ stands for end of the line.

Upvotes: 0

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