Problem with date regex

[lilnow]

Hi

I am new to php and regex. I have a school exercise - I'm pretty sure the problem is in my $match variable, but lack the experience to see where I have gone wrong. I get a "Delimiter must not be alphanumeric or backslash". Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks.

 

// format for birthday of MMM-DD-YYYY. The year cannot be later than the current year.

$birthdate = $_GET["birth"];

$birth31days="/^(JAN|MAR|MAY|JUL|AUG|OCT|DEC)-([0-2][0-9] | [3][01])$/i";

$birth30days="/^(APR|JUN|SEP|NOV)-([0-2][0-9] | [3][0])$/i";

$birth29days="/^(FEB)-([0-2][0-9])$/i";

$years="/^19[0-9][0-9 ]$| ^20(0[0-9]| 1[01])$/";

$match = (($birth31days|$birth30days|$birth29days)-($years));

echo $match;

$birthRegex = $match;

if (preg_match($birthRegex, $birthdate)){              <-- error message implies it's here

echo "Birthday: $birthdate <br />";

}

else{

echo "Format incorrect. You entered $birthdate. Please go back and try again <br />";

}

[.josh]

you have delimiters and modifiers in each of your $birth...(and $years) variables, treating them as individual patterns, but then put them all together in $match and treat it as a single pattern. You need to remove the delimiters and modifiers from those variables and only have the delimiter and modifier appear once, wrapped around the whole pattern.

 

Also, your $match variable...you need to wrap that entire thing in quotes...the way you have it now, php attempts to parse that as a mathematical expression. You should have seen from your own echo $match that something was funky...

[lilnow]

Thanks for the suggestion Crayon Violet. I merged the four variables and ended up with this - and it works!

'/^(((feb)\-((0[1-9])|([12][0-9])))|((apr|jun|sep|nov)\-((0[1-9])|([12][09])|30))|((jan|mar|may|jul|aug|oct|dec)\-((0[1-9])|([12][09])|(3[01]))))\-((19[0-9][0-9])|(20((0[0-9])|(1[01]))))$/i';