Regex testing for special characters - javascript

I'm trying to write a regex to test for certain special characters, but I think I am overcomplicating things. The characters I need to check for are: &<>'"
My current regex looks like such:
/&<>'"/
Another I was trying is:
/\&\<\>\'\"/
Any tips for a beginner (in regards to regex)? Thanks!

You are looking for a character class:
/[&<>'"]/
In doing so, any of the characters in the square brackets will be matched.
The expression you were originally using, /&<>'"/, wasn't working as expected because it matches the characters in that sequential order. In other words, it would match a full string such as &<>'" but not &<.

I'm assuming that you want to be able to match all of the characters you listed, at one time.
If so, you should be able to combine a character set with the g (global-matching) flag, for your regex.
Here's what it could look like:
/[<>&'"]/g

Try /(\&|\<|>|\'|\")/
it depends on what regex system you use

Related

regex validating if string ends with specific set of words [duplicate]

I'm creating a javascript regex to match queries in a search engine string. I am having a problem with alternation. I have the following regex:
.*baidu.com.*[/?].*wd{1}=
I want to be able to match strings that have the string 'word' or 'qw' in addition to 'wd', but everything I try is unsuccessful. I thought I would be able to do something like the following:
.*baidu.com.*[/?].*[wd|word|qw]{1}=
but it does not seem to work.
replace [wd|word|qw] with (wd|word|qw) or (?:wd|word|qw).
[] denotes character sets, () denotes logical groupings.
Your expression:
.*baidu.com.*[/?].*[wd|word|qw]{1}=
does need a few changes, including [wd|word|qw] to (wd|word|qw) and getting rid of the redundant {1}, like so:
.*baidu.com.*[/?].*(wd|word|qw)=
But you also need to understand that the first part of your expression (.*baidu.com.*[/?].*) will match baidu.com hello what spelling/handle????????? or hbaidu-com/ or even something like lkas----jhdf lkja$##!3hdsfbaidugcomlaksjhdf.[($?lakshf, because the dot (.) matches any character except newlines... to match a literal dot, you have to escape it with a backslash (like \.)
There are several approaches you could take to match things in a URL, but we could help you more if you tell us what you are trying to do or accomplish - perhaps regex is not the best solution or (EDIT) only part of the best solution?

Regular expression to find if all letters in a set or range exist anywhere in string

I am writing a regular expression in JavaScript to find if each of the letters in 'abt' is available anywhere in the string.
console.log(/(?=.*a)(?=.*t)(?=.*b)/i.test("at good and bad"));
If I have more characters to identify I have to make this regular expression long.
Can any one suggest me how can I optimize this?
If I have to match a specific range like a-z what I should do?
If I understand what you're trying to do, I think the following should work:
(.?[a]{1,}.?)|(.?[b]{1,}.?)|(.?[t]{1,}.?)
This will match any string that contains any of those letters at any position, in any word within the string. if you have to do ranges, like say, a-c, change the [a] to [a-c] and that will still work. This is case sensitive so if you want to check in a manner that is not case sensitive it would be[a-cA-C] or [aA].
Tested working at regex101.com

Unable to find a string matching a regex pattern

While trying to submit a form a javascript regex validation always proves to be false for a string.
Regex:- ^(([a-zA-Z]:)|(\\\\{2}\\w+)\\$?)(\\\\(\\w[\\w].*))+(.jpeg|.JPEG|.jpg|.JPG)$
I have tried following strings against it
abc.jpg,
abc:.jpg,
a:.jpg,
a:asdas.jpg,
What string could possible match this regex ?
This regex won't match against anything because of that $? in the middle of the string.
Apparently using the optional modifier ? on the end string symbol $ is not correct (if you paste it on https://regex101.com/ it will give you an error indeed). If the javascript parser ignores the error and keeps the regex as it is this still means you are going to match an end string in the middle of a string which is supposed to continue.
Unescaped it was supposed to match a \$ (dollar symbol) but as it is written it won't work.
If you want your string to be accepted at any cost you can probably use Firebug or a similar developer tool and edit the string inside the javascript code (this, assuming there's no server side check too and assuming it's not wrong aswell). If you ignore the $? then a matching string will be \\\\w\\\\ww.jpg (but since the . is unescaped even \\\\w\\\\ww%jpg is a match)
Of course, I wrote this answer assuming the escaping is indeed the one you showed in the question. If you need to find a matching pattern for the correctly escaped one ^(([a-zA-Z]:)|(\\{2}\w+)\$?)(\\(\w[\w].*))+(\.jpeg|\.JPEG|\.jpg|\.JPG)$ then you can use this tool to find one http://fent.github.io/randexp.js/ (though it will find weird matches). A matching pattern is c:\zz.jpg
If you are just looking for a regular expression to match what you got there, go ahead and test this out:
(\w+:?\w*\.[jpe?gJPE?G]+,)
That should match exactly what you are looking for. Remove the optional comma at the end if you feel like it, of course.
If you remove escape level, the actual regex is
^(([a-zA-Z]:)|(\\{2}\w+)\$?)(\\(\w[\w].*))+(.jpeg|.JPEG|.jpg|.JPG)$
After ^start the first pipe (([a-zA-Z]:)|(\\{2}\w+)\$?) which matches an alpha followed by a colon or two backslashes followed by one or more word characters, followed by an optional literal $. There is some needless parenthesis used inside.
The second part (\\(\w[\w].*))+ matches a backslash, followed by two word characters \w[\w] which looks weird because it's equivalent to \w\w (don't need a character class for second \w). Followed by any amount of any character. This whole thing one or more times.
In the last part (.jpeg|.JPEG|.jpg|.JPG) one probably forgot to escape the dot for matching a literal. \. should be used. This part can be reduced to \.(JPE?G|jpe?g).
It would match something like
A:\12anything.JPEG
\\1$\anything.jpg
Play with it at regex101. A better readable could be
^([a-zA-Z]:|\\{2}\w+\$?)(\\\w{2}.*)+\.(jpe?g|JPE?G)$
Also read the explanation on regex101 to understand any pattern, it's helpful!

Regular expression handle multiple matches like one, how to fix?

I have a regex, and a string that includes some matches for this regex. My regex handle all this matches like it is only one big match (of course I don't want such behaviour), let me show you an example:
My test string (sorry for scribble, but this doesn't matter):
sdfsd -dsf- sdfsdfssdfsfdsfsd -sdfsdf-
my regex in js code:
view.replace(/(\-(.+)\-)/g, '<span style="background-color:yellow">$1</span>');
my result:
sdfsd<span style="background-color:yellow">-dsf- sdfsdfssdfsfdsfsd -sdfsdf-</span>
As you can see each of this strings in the "-" must be enclosed in span, but there is only one span. How I can fix this? (honestly I don't want change my (.+) regex part, which I think might be a problem, but if there is no other way to do this, let me know).
In other words, result must be:
sdfsd<span style="background-color:yellow">-dsf-</span> sdfsdfssdfsfdsfsd <span style="background-color:yellow">-sdfsdf-</span>
Feel free to ask me in the comments, and thanks for your help.
honestly I don't want change my (.+) regex part, which I think might be a problem
Why not, it is actually the source of the problem, you can try the following regex which would work:
/(\-([^-]+)\-)/g
and if you think that dashes - can appear between - and - themselves then you can use the less efficient:
/(\-(.+?)\-)/g
+? causes a lazy match, or in other words after matching the initial -, then .+? matches a single character then it moves control to the following - which tries to match a dash, if it couldn't then .+? reads (consumes) another character from the input and so on until the following - is able to match.
You can try:
view.replace(/-([^-]+)-/g, '<span style="background-color:yellow">$1</span>');

regexp match _ or no character

I have a small problem with JavaScript regexp.
I want to match a part of the html class, something like:
req_password_sameAs-myid_min-6
A want to match sameAs-myid only, but with idea that there is a possibility to not have other characters after this string for example:
req_password_sameAs-myid
is also an option.
I use this expression
detectCase[i].match(/sameAs-.*?(_|)/g)
but don't know how to tell regexp _ or no characters as you can see.
Thank you in advance
Regex quantifiers. _? is the same as _{0,1}, means 'an underscore or nothing'.
You should be more specific than .*?. That's your problem, not the syntactically correct (but ugly) way of making the underscore optional.
Try
/sameAs-[a-zA-Z]*/g

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