Skip to Content
Regular Expressions Cookbook, 2nd Edition
book

Regular Expressions Cookbook, 2nd Edition

by Jan Goyvaerts, Steven Levithan
August 2012
Intermediate to advanced
609 pages
19h 16m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Regular Expressions Cookbook, 2nd Edition

Chapter 4. Validation and Formatting

This chapter contains recipes for validating and formatting common types of user input. Some of the solutions show how to allow variations of valid input, such as U.S. postal codes that can contain either five or nine digits. Others are designed to harmonize or fix commonly understood formats for things such as phone numbers, dates, and credit card numbers.

Beyond helping you get the job done by eliminating invalid input, these recipes can also improve the user experience of your applications. Messages such as “no spaces or hyphens” next to phone or credit card number fields often frustrate users or are simply ignored. Fortunately, in many cases regular expressions allow you to let users enter data in formats with which they are familiar and comfortable, with very little extra work on your part.

Certain programming languages provide functionality similar to some recipes in this chapter through their native classes or libraries. Depending on your needs, it might make more sense to use these built-in options, so we’ll point them out along the way.

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.

Read now

Unlock full access

More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly

AirBnbBlueOriginElectronic ArtsHomeDepotNasdaqRakutenTata Consultancy Services

QuotationMarkO’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.
Julian F.
Head of Cybersecurity
QuotationMarkI wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.
Addison B.
Field Engineer
QuotationMarkI’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.
Amir M.
Data Platform Tech Lead
QuotationMarkI'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Mark W.
Embedded Software Engineer

You might also like

Regular Expressions Cookbook

Regular Expressions Cookbook

Jan Goyvaerts, Steven Levithan
SQL Cookbook, 2nd Edition

SQL Cookbook, 2nd Edition

Anthony Molinaro, Robert de Graaf

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781449327453Errata Page