Question

I am trying to use a javascript regular expression to validate date of birth textbox. here is my code

var patt=/[0-9]{1,2}/[0-9]{1,2}/[0-9]{4}/;
alert(patt.test("1985/08/03"));

and the error said: SyntaxEror: Unexpected token {

I don’t understand why, this pattern works fine in the asp.net RegularExpressionValidator controller.
Many thanks

Answer 1

You need to escape the / characters, otherwise the interpreter sees the first one and thinks that’s the end of the regexp.

You should also put anchors in your regexp to ensure it matches the whole string, and doesn’t match any string which happens to contain that pattern.

For brevity you can use \d instead of [0-9], too:

var patt = /^\d{1,2}\/\d{1,2}\/\d{4}$/;

NB: your sample doesn’t work – you’ve put the year first, but the RE is expecting it to be last.