Perl: Limiting odd characters?

Sergei Steshenko · 04-29-2009, 12:08 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by JoeBleaux

Sergei, thank you for your replies but, I am not a programmer and I do not have that mindset. I try and do as little coding as possible.

'RTFM' replies do me no good. I need examples of how things work. I have read Perl docs until my eyes bleed and I do not understand them (same with man pages), they are useless to me. I need examples to understand.

Telemachos reply, "/[^-A-Za-z0-9@._]/" explains it all to me...

// = This is a regex
^ = not the following
-A-Za-z0-9@._ = allowed characters
[] = match the characters inside these.

I understand.

54 lines of Perldoc gibberish just confuses me. It is the same as Greek.

I think you do not understand how to express what you do not understand.

As I said, start reading the 54 line, and ask the question about the first thing you do not understand.

Then you may get an answer.

Otherwise you are just waisting our time.

theNbomr · 04-29-2009, 11:33 PM

Code:

s/[^A-Za-z0-9@.-_\s]+//g

--- rod.

Telemachos · 04-30-2009, 06:46 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by theNbomr

Code:

s/[^A-Za-z0-9@.-_\s]+//g

For whatever it's worth, I thought that the OP wants to catch and reject usernames that include bad characters (rather than just cleaning them out with a substitution). I was imagining an input in a loop. The loop doesn't move forward until the user enters a valid username. 'Valid' in this case means simply free of bad characters. I may be wrong though about the OP's intentions.

JoeBleaux · 05-01-2009, 10:20 AM

Telemachos, you are correct. When someone enters a username, I wanted it to be checked for any dis-allowed characters (everything except [A-Za-z0-9@.-_]). It just had to find (match) one dis-allowed character so I could use an if statement to reject the username and tell them to try again.

Reading it in one character at a time isn't what I wanted but, it's easy enough to use your regex to do what I wanted.

I just have a problem getting my head around regex-es and the manuals are not written for non-programmers.

Sergei Steshenko · 05-01-2009, 12:04 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by JoeBleaux

Telemachos, you are correct. When someone enters a username, I wanted it to be checked for any dis-allowed characters (everything except [A-Za-z0-9@.-_]). It just had to find (match) one dis-allowed character so I could use an if statement to reject the username and tell them to try again.

Reading it in one character at a time isn't what I wanted but, it's easy enough to use your regex to do what I wanted.

I just have a problem getting my head around regex-es and the manuals are not written for non-programmers.

Huh ?

Perl, as many others, is a programming language, so the target audience is programmers. It would be illogical to expect a manual written for non-programmers.

Anyway, I haven't yet seen any particular question related to the already mentioned 54 lines (line #712 until line #765 in 'perldoc perlop').

Telemachos · 05-01-2009, 12:16 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sergei Steshenko

Anyway, I haven't yet seen any particular question related to the already mentioned 54 lines (line #712 until line #765 in 'perldoc perlop').

For god's sake, let it go. He doesn't like the manual. He isn't going to send you any questions about the 'already mentioned 54 lines.' It's over. Let's all open a beer and enjoy the sunset.