Question

I dont know how doable this is but I’m working on a datatype for an XSD and one of the things I’m trying to do is expand it to allow for a hyphen in a last name. So this should match Smith Fry and Safran-Foer. Additionally, I’d like to limit the length of the string being checked to no more than 100 (or 101) characters. My Regex originaly was:

 <xsd:pattern value="[a-zA-Z ]{0,100}"/>

Now I know I can do something where I break this up and arbitrarily allow 50 characters on either side like:

 <xsd:pattern value="[a-zA-Z ]{0,50}(\-)?[a-zA-Z ]{0,50}"/>

But that seems ungraceful. Is there any way to do something along the lines of:

 <xsd:pattern value="[a-zA-Z (\-)?]{0,100}"/>

Another way of asking for what I’m looking for is ‘Match a string of characters between 0 and 100 long with no more than 1 hyphen in it’.

Thanks!

Answer 1

This is a swing at 'Match a string of characters between 0 and 100 long with no more than 1 hyphen in it' plus some additional constraints:

• allow for whitespace
• can’t start or end with a hyphen

I don’t think you could have the max length done in the pattern considering the syntax supported by XSD regex; it is easy, however, to combine it with a maxLength facet.

This is an XSD:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<!--W3C Schema generated by QTAssistant/W3C Schema Refactoring Module (http://www.paschidev.com)-->
<xsd:schema targetNamespace="http://tempuri.org/XMLSchema.xsd" elementFormDefault="qualified" xmlns="http://tempuri.org/XMLSchema.xsd" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">
    <xsd:element name="last-name">
        <xsd:simpleType>
            <xsd:restriction base="xsd:string">
                <xsd:maxLength value="100"/>
                <xsd:pattern value="[a-zA-Z ]+\-?[a-zA-Z ]+"/>
            </xsd:restriction>
        </xsd:simpleType>
    </xsd:element>
</xsd:schema>

The pattern could be further refined to prohibit a hyphen surrounded by whitespace only, etc.

Valid XML:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" standalone="yes"?>
<!-- Sample XML generated by QTAssistant (http://www.paschidev.com) -->
<last-name xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns="http://tempuri.org/XMLSchema.xsd">last - name</last-name>

Invalid XML (too many hyphens) and message:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" standalone="yes"?>
<!-- Sample XML generated by QTAssistant (http://www.paschidev.com) -->
<last-name xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns="http://tempuri.org/XMLSchema.xsd">l-ast - name</last-name>

Validation ERROR:

Error occurred while loading [], line 3 position 121
The 'http://tempuri.org/XMLSchema.xsd:last-name' element is invalid - The value 'l-ast - name' is invalid according to its datatype 'String' - The Pattern constraint failed.

Invalid XML (longer than max, for tests I’ve used maxLength=14) and message:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" standalone="yes"?>
<!-- Sample XML generated by QTAssistant (http://www.paschidev.com) -->
<last-name xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns="http://tempuri.org/XMLSchema.xsd">last - name that is longer</last-name>

Validation ERROR:

Error occurred while loading [], line 3 position 135
The 'http://tempuri.org/XMLSchema.xsd:last-name' element is invalid - The value 'last - name that is longer' is invalid according to its datatype 'String' - The actual length is greater than the MaxLength value.