regular expressions doing my head in

[Distant_storm]

ok heres the thing I want to make a function that validates a string thats sent to it here is what i have after fiddling.

$input=$_GET['input'];

function validate($make) {

if (eregi('(^[a-zA-Z0-9.'])|([:punct:])$',$make)) {

print "no error found";

} else {

print "error found";

}
}

validate($input);



and yet i get stupid error messages . If anyone can type out the regular expression that !!!!

ONLY ALLOWS any letter or number or any punct marks and any space !!!!!

This is to stop stupid ascii characters etc

if you could message me when you reply thanks

[printf]

there are a lot of valid punctuation marks, like (double dagger, inverted question mark, ...) over 80 that I can think of! Do you want to allow of those to! Maybe it would be better if you list exactly what ones to allow!

me!

[redbullmarky]

certain characters are 'control characters' in regex, including the full stop. to literally mean a full stop, you need to escape it with a backslash. also, you have a single quote (') between your outer single quotes. (i'm not a regex expert so someone may need to elaborate on this):

[code]
"^[a-zA-Z0-9\.\'])|([:punct:])$"
[/code]

[Distant_storm]

ok I want

any letter or number

. full stop
+ pluss sign
= equals sign
, comma
' apos
:
;
(
)
&
£
"
!
?

thats all i want to allow

if you could sort that out for me or teach me that would be an amazing help.

p.s im not totaly dum been programming php for about 2 years self taught "looks proud"

[php_coder_dvo]

put that thing in array, and then in filter search that value in array. if it exists continue, if not exit...