Regular expressions are a bit tricky, but they can be quite handy. I found an error
in mine; it should have read: <@REGEX
EXPR="^[_a-zA-Z0-9-]+(\.[_a-zA-Z0-9-]+)*@[a-zA-Z0-9-]+(\.[a-zA-Z0-9-]+)+$" STR="<@ARG
email>" TYPE="E">. I'll explain why in a sec.
I am by no means an expert, but here are some basics:
1. The ^ tells it to look for the string only the beginning, $ matches only the end.
2. . matches any character, + one or more occurences, * 0 or more occurences
3. Parentheses group sets of characters (and). Brackets match one of the values
contained by them (or).
4. Special characters need to be escaped with \
5. Tell it which characters you want to allow. In this case, I've allowed
combinations of mixed case and numeric groups.
So, it's looking for a string in the format [EMAIL PROTECTED] or [EMAIL PROTECTED] which means regex
succeeds for anything that looks like [EMAIL PROTECTED], but i also get
[EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] However shannon
[EMAIL PROTECTED] and al;ka'k@'KSJdflkj.com will fail because I haven't allowed for
spaces or punctuation other than periods.
In the end, it's not much different than doing an @LOCATE except I can make sure the
address is well-formed (though not valid) , and I can tell it which characters are
acceptable rather than which ones are not.
<@REGEX> returns and array if it succeeds, meaning the string is correctly formed. It
returns text 'C' or 'M' if it fails, so I set a local variable equal to <@REGEX
EXPR="^[_a-zA-Z0-9-]+(\.[_a-zA-Z0-9-]+)*@[a-zA-Z0-9-]+(\.[a-zA-Z0-9-]+)+$" STR="<@ARG
email>" TYPE="E"> and then check its type with <@VARINFO>; if it's text the email is
invalid.
As to what I changed in the regular expression to validate an email, I changed the
final * to a +. That way, it no longer accepts shannon.henderson@reed as a valid
address.
I hope that helps.
Shannon Henderson
Web and System Services
Reed College
Portland, OR
--- You wrote:
Shannon sent this awhile back but I am unsure how to implement it having
never used this tag before and on reading about it still being unclear.
Also I need to make sure that there are no spaces in the email in the email
and I am not sure it does that.
I am not in a hurry for an answer to this. I am expecting something that
would go in the IsMissing action.
Right now I know one sign up taf all users have a set @xxx.xxx address so I
am using <@Locate> for that and if it evaluates to 0 then I trap them.
The other I am only looking for the @ symbol. I could easily add the "."
also and the space if I could figure out who to do a locate for that so I
would end up with three missing filed inserts all different @ locates.
I can use that till I get a better understanding of this one.
Dan
on 6/4/02 12:01 PM, Shannon Henderson at
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> If you want to use a regular expression to validate it with your taf file, you
> can use:
> <@REGEX
> EXPR="^[_a-zA-Z0-9-]+(\.[_a-zA-Z0-9-]+)*@[a-zA-Z0-9-]+(\.[a-zA-Z0-9-]+)*$"
> STR="<@ARG email>" TYPE="E">
>
> The only advantage this offers is the ability to block invalid characters.
>
>
> Shannon Henderson
> Web and System Services
> Reed College
> Portland, OR
>
> --- You wrote:
> Anyone have a snippet to validate email address when it is entered in a form
> make sure it is valid format.
> --- end of quote ---
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--
Dan Stein
Digital Software Solutions
799 Evergreen Circle
Telford PA 18969
Land: 215-799-0192
Mobile: 610-256-2843
FMP, WiTango, EDI,SQL 2000
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
www.dss-db.com
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