Regular expression for punctuation

[Chris Leffer]

Hi.

I am trying to define a regular expression that accepts letters and
punctuation characters. I read something about Posix where I could use
[:punct:] in order to accept all the punctuation characters, but I could
not find how to add this to my expression. My expression is a simple
[A-Za-z]. How can I make it accept all the punctuation characters also?

Regards,

Chris Leffer


*** Sent via Developersdex [url]http://www.developersdex.com[/url] ***
Don't just participate in USENET...get rewarded for it!

[Chris R. Timmons]

Chris Leffer <anonymous@devdex.com> wrote in
news:uIEpkDkRDHA.2240@TK2MSFTNGP11.phx.gbl:

> Hi Chris,
>
> I looked at the site. Very good information, thanks.
>
> But I tried to use the \p in my expression and it did not work.
> I finished the following expression that I use with a regular
> expression validator control:
>
> [A-Za-zÀ-ú0-9 \p{Po}]*
>
> I need to accept letters, accented letters, digits, spaces and
> punctuation characters. If I type any kind of character as < or

> > for example, all of them are accepted. Can you see what is

> wrong with this expression?

Chris,

The * quantifier on the end means "zero or more". The short answer
is to use the + quantifier (one or more) instead.

The long answer is that the * quantifier can sometimes cause strange
problems because it always matches. When using your regex in a
operation to replace the > characters in string a>b>c with an x, I
received an incorrect result of xx>xx>xx. Changing the * to a +
caused the replacement regex to operate correctly and return a value
of x>x>x.


Hope this helps.

Chris.
-------------
C.R. Timmons Consulting, Inc.
[url]http://www.crtimmonsinc.com/[/url]