Help on Regular Expressions

[kieran]

Hi,

I am unfamilar with Regular Expressions and have been trying to get a
regular expression for a car registration field on a form. What i need
the expression to do is to not allow spaces or dashes i.e. '-'.

For example we have car regs that must be in the form of 01D21, but
some users enter 01 D 21 or 01-D-21.

Any help, greatly appreciated.

 

[Herfried K. Wagner [MVP]]

I am unfamilar with Regular Expressions and have been trying to get a
regular expression for a car registration field on a form. What i need
the expression to do is to not allow spaces or dashes i.e. '-'.

For example we have car regs that must be in the form of 01D21, but
some users enter 01 D 21 or 01-D-21.

\\\
Imports System.Text.RegularExpressions
..
..
..
MsgBox(Regex.IsMatch("12D01", "^\d\d[A-Z]\d\d$"))
MsgBox(Regex.IsMatch("12-D 01", "^\d\d[A-Z]\d\d$"))
///

 

[Andrew Morton]

I am unfamilar with Regular Expressions and have been trying to get a
regular expression for a car registration field on a form. What i
need the expression to do is to not allow spaces or dashes i.e. '-'.

For example we have car regs that must be in the form of 01D21, but
some users enter 01 D 21 or 01-D-21.

Any help, greatly appreciated.

How about using Replace to remove spaces and dashes?

It's nicer for the program to understand user input than for the user to
have to conform to some arbitrary restriction on what they can input.

Andrew

 

[kieran]

cheers Herfried and Andrew for your help.

both work great...i forgot all about Replace...it'll be much more
usability friendly.

cheers.

 

[Herfried K. Wagner [MVP]]

cheers Herfried and Andrew for your help.

both work great...i forgot all about Replace...it'll be much more
usability friendly.

In addition to that, you could use a masked edit box (available out of the
box in .NET 2.0) which allows the user to enter data in a certain format, or
you could use an ErrorProvider component to make the user aware of malformed
input when input validation is performed.