Improved Input Validation - Common Applications

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For example, one of the most common applications of regular expressions is to check whether or not a user's email address, as entered into an online form, is in the correct format. If it is, the form is processed. If it's not, a warning message pops up asking the user to correct the error. Regular expressions thus play an important role in the decision-making routines of Web applications - although, as you'll see, they can also be used to great effect in complex find-and-replace operations.

A regular expression usually looks something like this:


/war/



All this does is match the pattern "war" in the text it's applied to.

How about something a little more complex? Try this:


/ri+/



This would match the words "ring", "right" and "river-bed". And although it's a pretty silly example, you have to admit that there's truth to it - after all, wasn't the "ring" found "right" at the bottom of the "river-bed"?

The "+" that you see above is the first of what are called "meta-characters" - these are characters that have a special meaning when used within a pattern. Similar to the "+" meta-character, we have "*" and "?" - these are used to match zero or more occurrences of the preceding character, and zero or one occurrence of the preceding character, respectively.
 
In case all this seems a little too imprecise, you can also specify a range for the number of matches. For example, the regular expression:


/mat{2,6}/



would match "matting" and "mattress", but not "matrix". The numbers in the curly braces represent the lower and upper values of the range to match. You can leave out the upper limit for an open-ended range match.

Now, regular expressions are a topic in themselves - I don't plan to spend any more time on them (although you certainly can, here). Instead, let's look at what this has to do with ASP.NET validation, next.

Next: Regular Joe >>
 

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