RegEx Pattern - Special Characters

[J Windebank]

Hi guys,

Could someone please help me with a RegEx pattern, these still mess me around a bit.

I need a pattern that will evaluate true if any of the single characters are tested against it.

,(){}[]-+*%/="'~!&|<>?:;. or a space

Thanks,
Jordan

[Wacky]

It's been a while since I played with regexes (especially in JavaScript), so I can't remember if it can be written in a less unwieldy way:

var re = /\,|\(|\)|\{|\}|\[|\]|\-|\+|\*|\%|\/|\=|\"|\'|\~|\!|\&|\||\<|\>|\?|\:|\;|\.| /;
alert(re.test('+')); // true - it's in there
alert(re.test('1')); // false - not in the pattern

Should work.

[7stud]

alert(/[abc123]/.test("hello 1 world"));

[J Windebank]

Wacky: Perfect, that works a charm, thank you.

7stud: I don't understand the importance of that snippet?

Regards,
Jordan

[Wacky]

You're welcome.

I'm not entirely sure what 7stud was pointing out, but his example reminded me of two things:

1. You can avoid extraneous variables floating around your code if you don't need them by directly calling .test() from the regex, as in his example.
2. As I should have seen before (I can forgive myself for getting stuck on a single train of thought - it was waaay past my bed time), you can write the regex a bit more clearly:

var re = /[\,\(\)\{\}\[\]\-\+\*\%\/\=\"\'\~\!\&\|\<\>\?\:\;\. ]/; // I did only say "a bit"!

It might be a little less painful if you ever want to alter it, now.

[dek]

You don't need to go to quite such extremes with the delimiters, mind

  var re = /[,(){}\[\]\-+*%\/="'~!&|<>?:;. ]/;

should work just fine. Inside a [ ] clause, you only need to delimit (afaik) [ ] \ and - [EDIT - and / in js, of course]

[Wacky]

I had a feeling that was the case, but couldn't remember for sure. It was easier for my lazy self to err on the side of extreme caution, rather than take out all the backslashes.

Thanks for the heads-up.

[J Windebank]

Got it working, thank you guys. Starting to get my head around Regular Expressions.

Regards,
Jordan