[RESOLVED] [[:punct:]] exception for reg. expressions

[system_critical]

I'm trying to allow apostrophe's in a particular form input for this social site I've been working on forever. I'm using regular expressions to test most of my inputs for illegal characters, but I want to allow ' in this exception. Is there a way to use [[:punct:]], but with the apostrophe as an exception, or do you have to list everything and just leave out apostrophe. Thanks again for all the help.

[NogDog]

You could just use an apostrophe. For instance, if you want to allow letters and apostrophes but nothing else, and the value cannot start or end with an apostrophe:

if(preg_match('/^[a-z]+(\'[a-z]+)?$/i', $value))
{
   // OK
}
else
{
   // invalid
}

[system_critical]

Awsome. Thank you very much. That should work perfectly. I need to get better at reg. ex. syntax. One of these days I'm going to spend some time studying.

[NogDog]

PS: If you need to allow more than one apostrophe, change the )? to )* in the pattern.

[system_critical]

Thanks, that works well. Looks like one problem I was having was a lot of magic slashes coming out of nowhere. So, of course I had to stripslashes() from a lot of my strings first.