I have got confused most of the times, I need to escape special characters when specifying a regular expression.
Let us take an example of simple date format
dd/mm/yyyy
There are two ways, you can specify your regular expression
// Please note that your regular expression literal object must be surrounded
// between forward slashes as is done below.
// Since forward slash (/) has a special meaning in regular expressions
// it need to be escaped by a backslash (\)
var regex = /^\d{2}\/\d{2}\/\d{4}$/
regex.test("01/04/1975");
/* / -- Used to signify that a regex literal follows.
* ^ - Starts with
* \d{2} - 2 digits (date)
* \/ - Escaping the forward slash
* \d{2} - 2 digits (Month)
* \/ - Escaping the forward slash
* \d{4} - 4 digits (Year)
* $ - end of string.
* / - specifies the end of regex literal.
*/
// Things become more complex when you want to specify
// regular expression in a String
// Please note the difference between the regex literal and the string regex
// Here we have to escape the backslash as well.
// So the number of backslashes are doubled.
var regex = new RegExp("^\\d{2}\\/\\d{2}\\/\\d{4}");
/*
* ^ - Starts with
* \\d{2} - 2 digits (date)
* \\/ - Escaping the forward slash
* \\d{2} - 2 digits (Month)
* \\/ - Escaping the forward slash
* \\d{4} - 4 digits (Year)
* $ - end of regex.
*/
Please note that you have to escape all those characters which have a special meaning in Regular expressions.
Just place a backslash before that character. (2 backslashes if you are specifying regex as a string literal)
List of characters that need to be escaped are :
[, ], ., ?, *, +, /, \, {, }, |, (, )
Related Post : http://javakafunda.blogspot.com/2011/06/10-java-regular-expression-examples-you.html
As i understand 'd' here stands for digit then this regex wont give correct dates like it will parse the value 99/99/9999 while its not a valid date.. isn't it?
ReplyDeleteDear aashu,
ReplyDeleteYes, you are absolutely right. But this example is not a very precise regular expression for date validation.
If you want to write a exact date validator, just have a look at the link given in the post, 10 java regular expressions that you must know. :)
Please note that it is always better to use ^ in the beginning and $ in the end.
ReplyDeletevar REAL_NUMBER = new RegExp("\\d+(\\.\\d+)?");
alert(REAL_NUMBER.test("333aad"));
The above code will give you alert true.
Correct code:
var REAL_NUMBER = new RegExp("^\\d+(\\.\\d+)?$");