Question

I have a quick regex question that I figured someone might know off the top of their head. What would the regex be for CakePHP’s validation be if I only want to allow upper/lower alphanumber, spaces, punctuation, and quotes? This is what I have, but it’s off:

 'rule' => array('custom', '/[a-z0-9\x20\x21\x2E\x3A\x3B\x3F\x2C\x27\x22]{0,600}/i'),

From what I get, the a-z0-9 covers alphanumeric, but shouldn’t the \xXX cover the punctuation with the ASCII hex codes? And then the {0,600] means a length of 0-600 characters, and i means upper and lower. What am I missing?

For example: valid: This is a “valid text”, which contains ‘ and punctuation!

invalid: This is an obvious XSS attempt

Answer 1

^([\d\w\s?!\.;:,'"\/\[\]\(\)=\+-]*)$

should work? You should provide examples of what texts you consider to be valid and which are invalid.

preg_match('/^([\d\w\s?!\.;:,'"\/\[\]\(\)=\+-]*)$/', $string);