Re: QF - regex rule

> I am starting to hate phps regex more and more ... Perl was much more > clear to me ... It seems you did not tryed to make your problem in Perl neither :p > Maybe I am wrong but to me "Perl style" seems to be not really true ... The PHP preg_*() functions use strict Perl regexs. (You can find very tricky small differences in the pcre documention, but these differences are so small that we can consider it 99.9% conformant) So if your regex does not work in a PHP preg_*() func, it won't work in Perl neither. So if you are not a regex master yet, just learn from: man perlrequick (for beginers) man perlre (full exhaustive documentation) Those documentations are from perldoc but works the same with PHP preg_* functions as I said. If you don't use a system with mans, you'll find those on the web or in your perldocs. http://www.perlpod.com/5.9.1/pod/perlrequick.html http://www.perlpod.com/5.9.1/pod/perlre.html (I am not a monger at all, but I always read those mans for details.) There are a lot of tutorials on the web too, to learn about Perl regex syntax. > I am trying to use the regex rule to exclude forbidden characters of > filenames in a textbox. The forbidden characters (Windows) are: > "\/:*?"<>" so I tried something like: > > [^\/:*?"<>] first and then {[^\/:*?"<>]}, {.*[^\/:*?"<>].*} > and a lot > stuff like that but the result is always that the rule only works for a > single forbidden character. OK, your problem is quite simple: excluding some characters: \ / : * ? " < > just start to escape the characters that have a regex meaning: * ? become \* \? Put the regex inside single quote string, or escape the " too. For the regex separator don't choose one that is inside so use | or ! for exemple. You also want to esclude an escape char, in PHP to put an escape char in a string, you have to escape it, in a perl regex it also has to be escaped, so this will be two double escapes like this \\\\ (pcre will only see \\) if (preg_match('![\\\\/:\*\?"<>]!', $name)) echo "$name is a Wrong Name!\n"; else echo "$name is a Good Name!\n" -- Cheers