Regular expression: How do I allow forward slashes?

[AlwaysCharging]

In my app, I allow users to submit urls. They (of course) need the
ability to submit urls with a forward slash, "/", but whats the
regular expression to allow them to do that?

I currently use:

validates_format_of :url, :with => /^[-\w\_.]+$/i

to only allow alphanumerics, dashes, underscores, and dots to prevent
cross site scripting when I later reconstruct these urls, but I can't
figure out how to allow "/" as well.

Any ideas?

[maryam kamali]

inotwell cumpiuter &and lunguish engilish thanks

--

You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby on Rails: Talk" group.
To post to this group, send email to rubyonra...@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to rubyonrails-ta...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-talk?hl=en.

[ralu]

am a newbee.. but i think u can use underscore method for the whole
url that will put '/' instead of ' : '

[frogstarr78]

Have you tried escaping them "\/"?

On Dec 18, 11:01 pm, AlwaysCharging <goodg...@gmail.com> wrote:

[Sven Riedel]

frogstarr78 wrote:
> Have you tried escaping them "\/"?

Another way would be to use %r, that way you can avoid the leaning
toothpick syndrome alltogether;

/^http:\/\/myhostname\.com\/foo$/i

would become

%r{http://myhostname\.com/foo}i

But before you start piecing your own regexp together have a look at
the regexp patterns in the URI::REGEXP::PATTERN module (in your ruby lib
directory under uri/common.rb). Could save you some work depending on
what and how you want to validate.

Sven

[Sven Riedel]

Sven Riedel wrote:
> /^http:\/\/myhostname\.com\/foo$/i
>
> would become
>
> %r{http://myhostname\.com/foo}i

And of course I forgot the anchors in the second example. So the correct
version is:

%r{^http://myhostname\.com/foo$}i

[Alan]

Use Ruby's other regexp syntax:

%r{pattern}

To continue your example below:

validates_format_of :url, :with => %r{^[-\w_./]+$}

[AlwaysCharging]

Yes, that did it. Thank you.
No idea how I try everything and overlook the simplest solution, duh.

And, Thank you to everyone else that weighed in as well, definitely
some other options to look into.

Side note: Anybody know why the period doesn't have to be escaped?
Like just "." allows the dot to be input, as well as "\."
So, [-\w\_\.\/] works just as [-\w\_.\/]. Why is this?

[frogstarr78]

It actually depends on where the "." is in the Regexp. In your case it
is inside a Character Class "[]". So it is matching the "." character
explicitly. Since \w is shorthand for the [a-zA-Z] character class. It
is parsed as a character class instead of an escaped "w" character. So
you could actually change the character class to be %r|[-\w_./]|. No
need to further escape the "_", or "-" since it is at the beginning of
the class (That's for another reason though).

[maryam kamali]

hello iam maryam ihave peroblem ishal go aftenon by

[AlwaysCharging]

But that made me question why I couldn't just put the "/" inside of
the bracket as well. Like why did that have to be escaped if the
period didn't. (I guess it's because in that syntax, the forward
slash has closure properties.)
Oh well it's working now, and I escaped the . as well (\.).
Thank you for your help. Much appreciated frogstarr

[frogstarr78]

Yeah, I understand what you mean. No worries.