I'm new to Regex and I'm trying to work it into one of my new projects to see if I can learn it and add it to my repitoire of skills. However, I'm hitting a roadblock here.
I'm trying to see if the user's input has illegal characters in it by using the .search
function as so:
if (name.search("[\[\]\?\*\+\|\{\}\\\(\)\@\.\n\r]") != -1) {
...
}
However, when I try to execute the function this line is contained it, it throws the following error for that specific line:
Uncaught SyntaxError: Invalid regular expression: /[[]?*+|{}\()@.
]/: Nothing to repeat
I can't for the life of me see what's wrong with my code. Can anyone point me in the right direction?
You need to double the backslashes used to escape the regular expression special characters. However, as @Bohemian points out, most of those backslashes aren't needed. Unfortunately, his answer suffers from the same problem as yours. What you actually want is:
The backslash is being interpreted by the code that reads the string, rather than passed to the regular expression parser. You want:
"[\\[\\]?*+|{}\\\\()@.\n\r]"
Note the quadrupled backslash. That is definitely needed. The string passed to the regular expression compiler is then identical to @Bohemian's string, and works correctly.