[SOLVED] eregi Help

[adam84]

I want to accept only letters, periods, single quote and spaces.

If I take out the \s, the expression works fine, but once I add the \s for the space in, it never passes. Any Ideas on what I should do?

 

This is what I have:

if( !eregi("^[A-Za-z.'\s]+$", $city) ) {
echo "<BR><FONT COLOR=RED><B>Invalid city</B></FONT>";
return false;
}

 

[nrg_alpha]

I want to accept only letters, periods, single quote and spaces.

If I take out the \s, the expression works fine, but once I add the \s for the space in, it never passes. Any Ideas on what I should do?

 

This is what I have:

if( !eregi("^[A-Za-z.'\s]+$", $city) ) {
echo "<BR><FONT COLOR=RED><B>Invalid city</B></FONT>";
return false;
}

 

For starters, I would avoid using ereg and start using preg (which is part of PCRE - or Perl Compatible Regular Expressions). As of PHP 6, support for POSIX (which uses the ereg syntax) will be dropped. PCRE is more robust and powerful.

 

Here is what you were trying to do , but using preg:

$city = 'New York';
if(preg_match('#^[a-zA-Z\s\.\']+$#', $city)){
   echo $city . ' meets the criteria!';
} else {
   echo $city . ' does not meet the criteria!';							
}

 

Notice how I used the escape character for the dot (which by itself without escape character is basically a wildcard that can be any character [execpt for \r, \n or \t if I am not mistaken]). Since I am using single quotes, I have to escape the single quote inside the delimiters so that the system knows I am actually referring to a literal single quote as opposed to confusing the system with a single quote (which closes the pattern which PCRE matches against).

 

So with or without a space, this work.

 

Cheers,

 

NRG

 

[effigy]

Notice how I used the escape character for the dot (which by itself without escape character is basically a wildcard that can be any character [execpt for \r, \n or \t if I am not mistaken]).

 

Metacharacters change within character classes--[.] will only match a period.

 

I want to accept only letters, periods, single quote and spaces.

 

If you only want spaces, be wary of \s. It encompasses all whitespace, thus allowing tabs, new lines, etc.

 

[adam84]

If you only want spaces, be wary of \s. It encompasses all whitespace, thus allowing tabs, new lines, etc.

 

So since I am wary, what would I using instead of \s?

[effigy]

A space: [A-Za-z.' ]+

[nrg_alpha]

Notice how I used the escape character for the dot (which by itself without escape character is basically a wildcard that can be any character [execpt for \r, \n or \t if I am not mistaken]).

 

Metacharacters change within character classes--[.] will only match a period.

 

Oops.. I stand corrected (I'm so used to needing to escape the dot). My bad 

 

Cheers,

 

NRG