Question

First off I’m horrible with regex, hoping I can get some help here cause no matter how much I read on the subject and try to use the generators for it. I can’t do it ever.

I basically want to validate address formats in a sense. So anything you would generally expect to see in a typed address I want to allow. My problem is I just don’t get regex enough to do it.

So an address similar to this I would like to tag as valid

555 Outtamah Way. #12
Skittles, OH. 99999-9999

so as the title implies a-z noncase sensitive, 0-9 and # . , –
Dont need it to validate in order, more than I need it to recognize if anything other than the above is there or not so I can preg_match it with PHP, anything other than I will end up throwing an exception for.

Answer 1

This will do what you want:

$string = "555 Outtamah Way. #12 Skittles, OH. 99999-9999";
$regex = "/^[a-z0-9#\- ,\.]+$/i";
preg_match($regex, $string, $matches);
$result = count($matches) > 0;
echo $result; // If this echo 1, as it does, the string match the regex