Server-Side Validations Using Regular Expressions

By Prasanna Pattam

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Validating user input is the bane of every software developer's existence. Having one module that addresses all the user inputs greatly reduces the number of validating errors. Writing a single routine that does all the validation would be very difficult and tedious. The Regular expressions tool, however, can be used to validate all user inputs. It can make your code faster, more efficient, and less error prone. Regular expressions are a powerful tool for searching and processing text, and even in its simplest form, can make many complex tasks easy. This article provides a brief tutorial on the basics of Regular expressions and shows how the module can be extended to test border conditions.

Regular Expressions: What are They?

Regular expressions are a tiny, highly specialized programming language. They used to only be familiar to Unix users. Text editors like vi allowed regular expressions-formatted searches. Finally, Microsoft decided to give the same power to us and implemented it in Interdev. Most likely people haven't noticed it when they are using Find in Interdev.

When Microsoft started creating scripting languages for the Windows platform, only JScript contained regular expressions, leaving VBScript alone in the dark. That changed with version 5 of the VBScript engine. To ensure that Visual Basic (VB) developers can use regular expressions, the VBScript regular expressions engine has been implemented as a COM object. This makes them much more powerful, since they can be called from various sources outside of VBScript, such as Visual Basic or C.

Regular expressions provide tools for developing complex pattern-matching and textual search-and-replace algorithms. Any Perl, egrep, awk, or sed developer will tell you that regular expressions are one of the most powerful utilities available for manipulating text and data. By creating patterns to match specific strings, a developer has total control over searching, extracting, or replacing data. In short, to master regular expressions is to master your data.

A regular expression is a series of characters that define a pattern. The pattern is then compared to a target string to see whether there are any matches to the pattern in the target string.

Patterns
Regular expressions are almost another language by itself. A pattern defines the criteria to search for within a string. Regular expressions can be as simple as plain text, or use a unique language consisting of special characters and modifiers to build these patterns.

Alphabetic Data:
In a regular expression, the period (.) represents exactly one occurrence of any character other than a new line. Thus, the regular expression m.n will be matched not only by man, but also by remind and mint, since each of them contain an m and a n separated by exactly one letter.

Numeric Data:
So far we have seen the string patterns. Let's see how to match numeric data. If you want to match the numbers, \d should be used. \d matches one numeric character

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