Question

I am making a simple social network with Ruby on Rails. I wanted to add a restriction of certain characters for the profile name when signing up. So, in my User.rb file, I have the following:

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  # Include default devise modules. Others available are:
  # :token_authenticatable, :confirmable,
  # :lockable, :timeoutable and :omniauthable
  devise :database_authenticatable, :registerable,
         :recoverable, :rememberable, :trackable, :validatable

  # Setup accessible (or protected) attributes for your model
  attr_accessible :email, :password, :password_confirmation, :remember_me,
                  :first_name, :last_name, :profile_name
  # attr_accessible :title, :body

  validates :first_name, presence: true
  validates :last_name, presence: true

  validates :profile_name, presence: true,
                           uniqueness: true,
                           format: {
                             with: /^[a-zA-Z0-9_-]+$/,
                             message: "must be formatted correctly."
                           }
  has_many :statuses

  def full_name
    first_name + " " + last_name
  end
end

I set up a test to validate that it works, and this is what the test is:

test "user can have a correctly formatted profile name" do
user = User.new(first_name: '******', last_name: '****', email: '********@gmail.com')
user.password = user.password_confirmation = '**********'
user.profile_name = '******'
assert user.valid?

end

When I run the test, I keep getting the error saying that something is wrong with my assert user.valid? line. So I am thinking I messed up some syntax in my with: /^[a-zA-Z0-9_-]+$/.

The error I am getting is 1) Failure:
test_user_can_have_a_correctly_formatted_profile_name(UserTest) [test/unit/user_test.rb:40]:

But on line 40, it has this piece of code assert user.valid?

Any help is appreciated 🙂

Answer 1

So I am thinking I messed up some syntax in my with regexp.

Your syntax is fine.

However, your error message clearly shows you’re using a profile name that doesn’t match.

Are you using some other character in a profile name, such as a space? Or period?

Try it like this:

/^[a-zA-Z0-9_-]+$/.match "foobar" #=> #<MatchData "foobar">

If the data fails to match, you’ll get nil:

/^[a-zA-Z0-9_-]+$/.match "foo bar" #=> nil