Pattern for Alpha and - symbol only...

[Bottyz]

Hi all,

 

 

I'm very new to regex and cannot get my head around all the characters. I've been testing out a few things to work it out but am struggling with one in particular.

 

I've created a news system for my website in php and on the main page you only have a truncated description of each article but with 'read more' links to the full article. The 'read more' links like news.php?article=

 

Where it has the ?article= it has a meaning full seo friendly title such as "new-website" or "news-page-launched" etc.... This link then brings up that full article.

 

My idea is to use a preg_match expression that makes sure all that is in the link is letters and the - symbol. This is to make sure no-one can insert code here and attack the site.

 

Is this a bad idea or can anyone help?

[Bottyz]

i've figured that this should be ok for use... Can anyone confirm?

 

function validate_art_url($str) {
pregmatch('^[a-z]+[\-]*$', $str) ==0;
}

[sasa]

<?php$test = 'ann+jokn';if(!preg_match('/[^a-z-]/', $test)) echo'OK';else echo'WRONG';?>