On Tue, 14 Sep 2004, Johnstone, Colin wrote: > I found this regex by searching on google and I assumed the guy who > wrote it knew more than me.
>From the look of this regex, that ain't necessarily so. The thing with regular expressions is that they tend to be crafted for very specific purposes, and unless this guy was trying to solve the exact same problem you are, the regex he wrote may not do what you need. > I guess I was looking for a general purpose regex to remove invalid > characters from filenames to add to my developers toolkit to take from > project to project. Shouldn't a toolkit consist of things you actually understand. It's like the old "give a man a fish" saying -- if as a result of this discussion you come away with a regex that solves this specific problem today, then you will be able to eat today. If on the other hand you start learning how regular expressions work, you'll be able to write your own ones and won't have to rely on questionable canned examples. > Specifically for this project I would like to remove spaces and > ampersands apostrophes, quotes should users enter them. That's nice. As others asked you, what would you like to *keep* ? This regular expression can be much more simply expressed in terms of matching everything other than that which you know you want. You probably want letters, digits, and maybe some punctuation, right? Try to list all the characters that are valid in filenames on all the platforms that Teamsite currently or could potentially run on, and then you'll be most of the way to the regex you want. Also, if you just want to strip out bad characters a substitution regex (one with s/.../.../ syntax) may be much more complicated than a simple tr/...// statement. Have you tried doing it that way ? -- Chris Devers -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <http://learn.perl.org/> <http://learn.perl.org/first-response>
