I looked and searched and couldn't find what I needed although I think it should be simple (if you have any Python experience, which I don't).
Given a string, I want to verify, in Python, that it contains ONLY alphanumeric characters: a-zA-Z0-9
and .
_
-
examples:
Accepted:
bill-gates
Steve_Jobs
Micro.soft
Rejected:
Bill gates
-- no spaces allowed
[email protected]
-- @ is not alphanumeric
I'm trying to use:
if re.match("^[a-zA-Z0-9_.-]+$", username) == True:
But that doesn't seem to do the job...
re.match
does not return a boolean; it returns a MatchObject
on a match, or None
on a non-match.
>>> re.match("^[a-zA-Z0-9_.-]+$", "hello")
<_sre.SRE_Match object at 0xb7600250>
>>> re.match("^[a-zA-Z0-9_.-]+$", " ")
>>> print re.match("^[a-zA-Z0-9_.-]+$", " ")
None
So, you shouldn't do re.match(...) == True
; rather, you should be checking re.match(...) is not None
in this case, which can be further shortened to just if re.match(...)
.