jQuery validate: How to add a rule for regular expression validation?

Question

I am using the jQuery validation plugin. Great stuff! I want to migrate my existing ASP.NET solution to use jQuery instead of the ASP.NET validators. I am missing a replacement for the regular expression validator. I want to be able to do something like this:

$("Textbox").rules("add", { regularExpression: "^[a-zA-Z'.\s]{1,40}$" })

How do I add a custom rule to achieve this?

Answer 1

Thanks to the answer of redsquare I added a method like this:

$.validator.addMethod(
        "regex",
        function(value, element, regexp) {
            var re = new RegExp(regexp);
            return this.optional(element) || re.test(value);
        },
        "Please check your input."
);

now all you need to do to validate against any regex is this:

$("#Textbox").rules("add", { regex: "^[a-zA-Z'.\\s]{1,40}$" })

Additionally, it looks like there is a file called additional-methods.js that contains the method "pattern", which can be a RegExp when created using the method without quotes.

---

Edit

The pattern function is now the preferred way to do this, making the example:

 $("#Textbox").rules("add", { pattern: "^[a-zA-Z'.\\s]{1,40}$" })

http://bassistance.de/jquery-plugins/jquery-plugin-validation/

http://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jquery.validate/1.9/additional-methods.js