Question

How to validate using Javascript an input tag of type text in an html form that the content of it will be one of the following:-

• Arabic or English Characters ONLY -OR-
• Arabic and English Characters ONLY -OR-
• Arabic characters only -OR-
• English Characters only -OR-
• Number only -OR-
• Arabic Characters and Number only -OR-
• English Characters and Number only -OR-
• Arabic or Number ONLY -OR-
• English Characters or Number ONLY -OR-
• Arabic or English Characters or Number ONLY -OR-
• Phone Number -OR-
• Email -OR-
• English string that starts with specific character like ‘A’ -OR-
• English string that ends with specific character like ‘A’ -OR-
• English string that contains specific character like ‘A’ -OR-
• English string that does not contain specific character like ‘A’

Thanks in advance ..

Answer 1

First, I need a definition of “English”, “Arabic” and “Numbers” characters.

1. The definition of the English character boundary should at least include a-z, A-Z. Non-word characters (comma, dot, parentheses) should also be included, but since you didn’t specify the purpose of your validation, I will limit these to a-z, A-Z.
   English RegExp: [a-zA-Z]
2. I’m not skilled in the Arabian language, so I grab include all characters as definied at this source.
   RegExp: /[\u0600-\u06ff\ufb50-\ufdff\ufe70-\ufeff]/
3. The numbers are defined as \d (in JavaScript: 0-9).
   RegExp: \d (equals [0-9] in JavaScript)
4. The beginning and the end of a string are matched by a ^ and $, using Regular expressions.

Brought together:

• Arabic and/or English Characters ONLY -OR-
  /^[a-zA-Z\u0600-\u06ff\ufb50-\ufdff\ufe70-\ufeff]+$
• Arabic characters only -OR-
  /^[\u0600-\u06ff\ufb50-\ufdff\ufe70-\ufeff]+$/
• English Characters only -OR-
  /^[a-zA-Z]+$/
• Number only -OR-
  /^\d+$/
• Arabic Characters and/or Number only -OR-
  /^[\du0600-\u06ff\ufb50-\ufdff\ufe70-\ufeff]+$
• English Characters and/or Number only -OR-
  /^[\dA-Za-z]+$/
• Arabic and/or English Characters and/or Number ONLY -OR-
  /^[a-zA-Z\d\u0600-\u06ff\ufb50-\ufdff\ufe70-\ufeff]+$/
• Phone Number -OR- Phone numbers are too locale-dependent, construct your own RE
• Email -OR-
  ^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$ ^{source 2} (very basic mail RegExp)
• English string that starts with specific character like ‘A’ -OR-
  /^A/
• English string that ends with specific character like ‘A’ -OR-
  /A$/
• English string that contains specific character like ‘A’ -OR-
  /A/
• English string that does not contain specific character like ‘A’
  ^[^A]+$

Of course, the English character set should include more characters than a-zA-Z if you’re validating sentences. I recommend to use [\x20-\x7e] instead of [a-zA-Z], so commonly used punctuation characters are also available.

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References / See also

• MDN: Regular expressions – A guide to use Regular Expressions in JavaScript
• Regulsr Expressions.info – Summary of character boundaries
• UTF8-chartable.de – Browser through all characters
• Unicode.org/charts – An official reference which documents all boundaries in a deeper detail