Regular Expression needed

donka

It's supposed to be easy i guess, but I'm stuck at writing a regular expression check for a 8 characters hexadecimal string. That's what I have

<?php
$guids = array(
               '14554450',
			   'afd67554',
			   'b9f10da8',
			   'r4345111111111',
			   't8383837',
			   '878787'
			   );
foreach ($guids as $guid){
	if(eregi("[a-fA-F0-9]{8}",$guid))
		echo $guid . " is a valid guid<br>";
	else
		echo $guid . " is not valid guid<br>";
}
?>

and the output is

14554450 is a valid guid
afd67554 is a valid guid
b9f10da8 is a valid guid
r4345111111111 is a valid guid
t8383837 is not valid guid
878787 is not valid guid

Line #4 is clearly not a valid string, but the others are fine.

Please help

mtmosier

You have to limit your expression to match against the entire string.

if(eregi('^[a-fA-F0-9]{8}$',$guid))

donka

Thanks a buch, that worked.
I did not find too much help on the synataxis for those expressions. Please link me to a good manual if you have one in mind.

mtmosier

I'd suggest searching this forum for "regex and tutorial" (without quotes). I've seen several good ones floating around, though mostly perl instead of ereg.

Drakla

I'm still a big fan of this place http://www.regular-expressions.info/tutorial.html because it has all the complex look ahead / back stuff that I'm still rubbish at.

And download this really nice freeware thing called The Regex Coach, it lets you see how much is matched as you go along

http://www.weitz.de/regex-coach/#install