Evaluate my Regular Expressions Please

hadoob024

Hello. I've written a couple of regular expression pattern strings and was wondering if someone could evaluate them to see if they are complete enough. I've written them to evaluate a first name field and also a description field (for a real estate listing).

Basically, they look complete to me, but I was wondering if anyone could see whether there are some cases that are legal but wouldn't pass my tests. Or if there are certain cases that shouldn't pass my test, but do. Here they are:

First name:
^{[a-zA-Z[:space:]-`']{1,15}$}

Description field:
^{[[:blank:][:punct:][:alnum:]]{1,240}$}

Thanks.

subwayman

Go and check out regex coach. This will allow you to develop and test regex expressions. It's magic.

Schmeg007

You can download regex coach at: http://www.weitz.de/regex-coach/#install

hadoob024

Cool! Thanks for the tip. I didn't even know that there was a product like that out there. In fact, I was just thinking that someone should come up with an automated tester for regex statements. Whaddya know... Thanks again.

hadoob024

I've been going through this RegEx Coach and I have a question. I noticed that it's used to test Perl-compatible regular expressions, but the expressions that I've written are POSIX style. Is the Perl style worth learning, or should I just try and manually test out the POSIX style expressions that I've written? Because I can't figure out how to test out my expressions on RegEx Coach. Thanks..