Regular expression

pheer

Is there a way to find out if a string contains any other character than thoose specified. In perl I would do i like this

if ( $value !~ /^[a-b]*$/ ) 
	print "value contains invalid characters.";

My first thought was preg_match, but it doesn´t seem to give me what I want. Any ideas?

tekky

ereg("^[A-Z]{0,}") //if NOT A-Z..... 0 matches are more....

pheer

I also found out this solution.

if ( !preg_match("/^[a-z]*$/, $string) ) {
     echo"The string contains invalid characters.";
}

helz

yeh i found wierd ones for this, what i use is:
a-z A-Z 0-9 and _

$test = preg_match("/^(\w+)$/",$haystack);
if ($test == 1) {
// $haystack has correct letters
} else {
// user has entered wrong letters
}

BSTRhino

If I understand your question right, the solution is quite easy. I will use preg_match, but you could easily use ereg or eregi.

if(preg_match('/[^\w@.]/i', $haystack)) {
    // haystack contains invalid characters.
}
else{
    // haystack contains no invalid characters.
}

The part of the pattern '/[^\w@.]/i' that actually does the work is this part: [^\w@.]

I'm sure you know about the [...] syntax meaning a character class so it will match any single character that is specified in the square brackets.

If the character class begins with a caret character, then it becomes a negated character class. For example, the character class [a-z] will match any character from 'a' to 'z.' By adding the caret character to the start, we have [^a-z] and this will match any character that is not from 'a' to 'z.'

So, in your case, you just have to type all the characters that are valid in square brackets, and just put a caret character at the start of the square brackets. That will match any characters but the ones you specify.

Does that answer your question?

pheer

Thanks for all the help guys, but I´ve allready answered my own guestion. What I was looking for was the "inverse" operator !
That correspond to perls !~

pheer

nothing

helz

i think that the variables that are created inside a function remain local until you use:
return $varname;
at the end of the function

tekky

variables in side a function are always local to that function unless that variable name was used out side the function and a global was used inside the functon to pull it from outside the function to inside the function for modification......

return does exactly that... returns the result of the function so you can make use of it elsewheres