NYCPHP Meetup

[David Sklar]

On Wednesday, September 17, 2003 12:09 PM,  wrote:

> Is this "kosher" for determining that something has not be left blank?
>
> '/^[^^$]{1,35}$/i',

No, it is not kosher. The regex matches strings like "country ham", "cheese
burger" and "shrimp scampi". In fact, it matches any 1 to 35 character
string that doesn't consist entirely of carets and dollar signs. If you want
to make sure that a string at least one but no more than 35 characters, use:

/^.{1,35}$/

But that would match a string of all whitespace. If you want to make sure
that the string doesn't begin with whitespace, try:

/^\S.{0,34}$/

Which guarantees that the first character is not whitespace.

However, you're better off not using a regex for this stuff. Instead, do
this to make sure a string is between 1 and 35 characters, after removing
leading and trailing whitespace:

$len = strlen(trim($s));
if (($len < 1) || ($len > 35)) {
  // the string is too long or too short
} else {
  // the string is just right
}


David