CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rubyregexvalidation
Backo
Backo

Reputation: 18871

Regex to validate strings having only characters (without special characters but with accented characters), blank spaces and numbers

I am using Ruby on Rails 3.0.9 and I would like to validate a string that can contain only characters (case insensitive characters), blank spaces and numbers.

More:

The regex that I know from this question is ^[a-zA-Z\d\s]*$ but this do not validate special characters and accented characters.

So, how I should improve the regex?

Upvotes: 3

Views: 8623

Answers (3)

Michal Krystl
Michal Krystl

Reputation: 1

Validation string only for not allowed characters. In this case |,<,>," and &.

^[^|<>\"&]*$

Upvotes: 0

Justin Morgan
Justin Morgan

Reputation: 30715

I wrote the ^(?:[^\W_]|\s)*$ answer in the question you referred to (which actually would have been different if I'd known you wanted to allow _ and -). Not being a Ruby guy myself, I didn't realize that Ruby defaults to not using Unicode for regex matching.

Sorry for my lack of Ruby experience. What you want to do is use the u flag. That switches to Unicode (UTF-8), so accented characters are caught. Here's the pattern you want:

^[\w\s-]*$

And here it is in action at Rubular. This should do the trick, I think.

The u flag works on my original answer as well, though that one isn't meant to allow _ or - characters.

Upvotes: 3

eugen
eugen

Reputation: 9226

Something like ^[\w\s\-]*$ should validate characters, blank spaces, minus, and underscore.

Upvotes: 0

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