Correct Regular expressions to match a date

Question

What is the correct regular expression to use to validate a date like. 2009-10-22 or 2009-01-01 etc. Platform PHP

Answer 1

This (from regexplib.com) will match what you want, and perform checks for leap years, days-per-month etc. It's a little more tolerant of separators than you want, but that can be easily fixed. As you can see, it's rather hideous.

Alternatively (and preferably in my opinion) you may want to simply check for figures in the correct places, and then perform leap year and days-per-month checks in code. Sometimes one regexp isn't so understandable and there's greater clarity in performing the checks in code explicitly (since you can report precisely what's wrong - "only 30 days in November", rather than a "doesn't match pattern" message, which is next to useless)