Validation regex

Hi All,

I want to write a validation regex for validating the input which is in the form
"DD-MMM-YYYY HRHH:MM Smiley Frustrated

S".
If anyone has done this validation using form API or in the DCT please let me know the same.
Any pointers would be of great help.

Thanks in advance
Vipin

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Adam Stoller

Hi All,

I want to write a validation regex for validating the input which is in the form
"DD-MMM-YYYY HRHH:MMS".
If anyone has done this validation using form API or in the DCT please let me know the same.
Any pointers would be of great help.

Thanks in advance
Vipin

Are you trying to validate it as a pattern, or in terms of pattern-and-value?
(I'm ignoring the "HR" prior to the "HH" since I'm not sure what that is supposed to represent)
The first is trivial and could be easily done with the validation-regex like:

"^[0-9]{2}-[A-Za-z]{3}-[0-9]{4} [0-9]{2}:[0-9]{2}:[0-9]{2}$"

You could make it a bit stricter with something like:

"^[0-3][0-9]-[ADFJMNOSadfjmnos][ACEOPUaceopu][BCGLNPRTVYbcglnprtvy]-[1-9][0-9]{3} [0-2][0-9]:[0-5][0-9]:[0-5][0-9]$"

Either of the above could also be done with JavaScript in FormAPI code, but if you're going to take the time to do it in JavaScript you might as well do something a bit more exacting - that validates the date as being a real date (i.e.: not February 34th) and the time as being a real time (i.e.: not 29:73:82) - if you cannot find an example to modify within the forums or KB articles on this site - you can probably find some examples via Google - though my guess is you will probably have to modify them to deal with the "MMM" portion as I believe most validation code is written to validate numerical months (in part because once you introduce month names you introduce the possibility of having to deal with different languages).

Migrateduser

The regex validation will not catch all the invalid dates example 99-99-9999 99:99:99. You can use regual expression and javascript objec to catch all the valid date & time format.

Regex: \d{2}-\d{2}-\d{4}\s\d{2}\d{2}\d{2}

Millie

Some time ago I wrote some code for validating dates and time in regular HTML pages.
Whilst I could have done this in procedural javascript, I wanted a solution that would mean I wouldn't have to re-code the same logic in the server language (perl in that instance).

So, I used regular expressions. I validated gregorian dates using the following (matches dates in the format dd/mm/yyyy including leap years)

/^((((0[1-9]|1\d|2[0-8])\/(0[1-9]|1[0-2]))|((29|30)\/(0[13-9]|1[0-2]))|(31\/(0[13578]|1[02])))\/(1[6-9]|2[0-4])\d\d|29\/02\/((16|20|24)00|(1[6-9]|2[0-4])([02468][48]|[13579][26]|[2468]0)))$/

Likewise, I validated 24hour times as (doesn't include seconds)

/^([01]\d|2[0-3]):[0-5]\d$/

These could be joined together to produce 1 monster regular expression suiting your needs. I have to say, I'd probably want to steer the users away from using the 3-letter month abbreviations!

Adam Stoller

Some time ago I wrote some code for validating dates and time in regular HTML pages.
Whilst I could have done this in procedural javascript, I wanted a solution that would mean I wouldn't have to re-code the same logic in the server language (perl in that instance).

So, I used regular expressions. I validated gregorian dates using the following (matches dates in the format dd/mm/yyyy including leap years)

/^((((0[1-9]|1\d|2[0-8])\/(0[1-9]|1[0-2]))|((29|30)\/(0[13-9]|1[0-2]))|(31\/(0[13578]|1[02])))\/(1[6-9]|2[0-4])\d\d|29\/02\/((16|20|24)00|(1[6-9]|2[0-4])([02468][48]|[13579][26]|[2468]0)))$/

Likewise, I validated 24hour times as (doesn't include seconds)

/^([01]\d|2[0-3]):[0-5]\d$/

These could be joined together to produce 1 monster regular expression suiting your needs. I have to say, I'd probably want to steer the users away from using the 3-letter month abbreviations!

There's a KB article (45818) - perhaps based on your code, which appears on the support site (not sure why it doesn't seem to show up on DevNet) - but frankly, using JavaScript will give you significantly greater flexibility in terms of handling all kinds of formats for the date - including abbreviated month names (which I too would recommend against using)

Perl is easier, IMO, because there are modules that will do almost all the work for you (e.g.: Date::Manip, Date::Format, etc.)