[Resolved] Pattern matching with ereg

[Calahan]

The code I have written below is supposed to stop people registering with non alpha or alphanumeric names/usernames. In time I will refine it to be more strict but for now it would be good just to get it off the gorund!
As I see it, this should work but I am still able to enter usernames such as ,,,,,,, or ....... or any other character that it is supposed to disallow.
Where exactly have I gone wrong?

foreach ($HTTP_POST_VARS as $key => $value)
	{
	if ($key == "username" or $key =="password" or $key =="firstname" or $key =="lastname")
		{
			if ($value == "")
			{
			$blank_array[$key] ="blank";
			}
		}
	if ($key == "username" or $key =="firstname" or $key =="lastname" or $key =="address1" or $key =="address2" or $key =="county" or $key =="postcode" or $key =="country")
		{
			if (!ereg("[A-Za-z' -]{1,40}",$key))
			{
			$bad_format[$key] ="bad";
			}
		}
	}

[Natty_Dreadlock]

have a look at http://de2.php.net/manual/de/function.preg-match.php - it uses perl compatible syntax, u could write your expression like this:

preg_match("/^[A-Za-z\\\\'\\040\\-]{1,40}$/", $key)

pls remove the second \ after the z - this forum does not allow me to post a single one there, no idea why...
this should work
hth