Regex consectutive numbers/letters

loveccb

Hello,

I'm trying to prevent against users entering consecutive numbers in the phone number, and consecutive letters in the first and last name on a form.

I want to prevent a user from typing 717-222-3124 or 717-531-1111 (as examples)

Here's what I have for the phone numbers.

$phone1 = 717
$phone2 = 818
$phone3 = 3040

$pattern1 = "/^\d{3}$/";
$pattern2 = "/\d{4}/";

       if (preg_match($pattern1, $phone2, $matches))  {
         echo "$phone2 Phone 2 Invalid<br>";
       }
       else {
         echo "$phone2 Phone 2 Valid<br>";
       }

       if (preg_match($pattern2, $phone3, $matches))  {
         echo "$phone3 Phone 3 Invalid<br>";
       }
       else  {
         echo "$phone3 Phone 3 Valid<br>";
       }

The problem is, it ALWAYS returns Invalid no matter what number I use
Any ideas? As a follow up, I'd like to do this for numbers to.

Many thanks!

Drakla

http://www.regular-expressions.info/brackets.html

Start at Repetition and Backreferences on that page, it's the best regex tutorial I've seen.

crazyjeremy

As a reminder... some of us have contact information that legitimately use consecutive numbers because it's a "vanity number" of sorts. I have tollfree numbers that use this concept, numbers that spell out words as well as numbers that use easy to remember patterns on the keypad. You may want to try to discourage people from putting inaccurate data in, but this might not be a good way as a significant percentage of people may legitimately have this occurance in their numbers.

madwormer2

Heh, and I just thought I must have read it wrong somewhere...

loveccb

Thanks for the link Drakla, you're right, great tutorial. I tried some of their ideas, but still no luck in getting my code to fuction correctly.

I thought this should work: "^(.)\1{1,}$"

But it's still not finding a match. Any ideas?
thanks!