spaces in PHP regular expressions

[fabiuz]

Hallo,

I am becoming crazy because I am trying to use the following reg expression to allow only starting and ending letter or numbers from a string, one space or one - or . or _ are allowed.

My regular expression is:

^{([a-zA-Z0-9]+)[\040-._]?([a-zA-Z0-9-]+)$}

and it is perfectly working with javascript but with php it doesn't
It seems like my PHP was unable to accept spaces.

ereg('^{([a-zA-Z0-9]+)[\040-._]?([a-zA-Z0-9-]+)$',} $nick)

Why it isn't working in php ?

If i try with something like:

test test

due to the space it doesn't match.
I have also tryed with \s but nothing changes.

Do you have the answer ?

Is it also possible to mantain such format and control lenght also ?
I mean can I also say more than 2 but less then 18 chars for the full phrase ?

Thank you very much

[Muntjewerf]

If you add a whitespace or " " it will probably work. Try this:

$nick = "blah blah blah blah blah";
if (!ereg('^([a-zA-Z0-9" "]+)[\040\-\._]?([a-zA-Z0-9-]+)$', $nick)) {

echo "error";
}
else {
echo "succes";
}

mazzel