Question

I basically have the following validation on my page – its a word rule in that a description in a text box cannot be greater than 3 words excluding the word ‘and’. I have implemented the following server side validation in C# which is working fine

if (Desc.Trim().ToString() != "")
{
    MatchCollection collection = Regex.Matches(Desc.Replace("and", ""), @"[\S]+");

    if (collection.Count > 3)
    {
        ErrorMsg.Append("Description should contain at most 3 words(excluding 'and').");
        ErrorMsg.Append("\\n");
    }
}

However I am having difficulty getting the same working in Javascript. I have tried the following but it isnt working so far so hoping for someone that has a better knowledge of Javascript can see the error. Note the if is part of a bigger validate function that fires on the page – the alerts were just there to see if it got into this if (which it doesnt) – when this is block is removed the rest of the JS on the page is working fine.

if (Desc.val().trim() != "")
{
    alert('1');
    !regexWordRule.test(Desc.val());
    alert('2');

    if (Desc.val().match(regexWordRule).length > 3)
    {
        errorText += "Description should contain at most 3 words(excluding 'and').";
    }

    valid = false;
}

and the below is my regexWordRule defined at the very top of the js file.

var regexWordRule = /[\S]+/;

Answer 1

You could find a better solution, but this approach came to my mind, so I am posting it:

var input = "and lorem and ipsum";

// remove ands
var deandizedinput = input.replace(/\band\b/g, ' ');

// replace all white spaces with a single space
var normalizedinput = deandizedinput.replace(/\s+/g, ' ');

// split the input and count words
var wordcount = normalizedinput.trim().split(' ').length;

Fiddle here.