Regex allows only 1 character

Question

$rex = \'/^[^<,\"@?=>|;#]$/i\';

I\'m having trouble with this regular expression. The idea is that the input fields are checked for certain chara

Answer 1

You'll want '/^[^<,"@$?=>|;#]+$/i' or '/^[^<,"@$?=>|;#]*$/i'.

For an example:

$valid = 'Hello';
$invalid = 'h

Which outputs:

'Hello' gives 1
'h

What I simply did was take your expression and add a + or * after your character group.

In regular expressions, * means match 0 or more occurences, and + means match 1 or more.

Since ^ means the beginning of the string and $ the end, without a + or *, you tell it to match a string the consists of exactly one occurrence of a non-special character, thus why it errors if your string is longer than one character.

If you wish, you can also remove the i at the end of the expression, as you don't need to do a case-insensitive match when no letters are involved in your expression.

For more information on regular expressions, take a look at Regular-Expressions.info.