Question

I have a viewmodel named “Classification” to be used in my MVC website.

I’m trying to validate a property named “Description” on this viewmodel using a regular expression attribute.

The requirements for this “Description” property are:

• Allows only the following characters:
  • Letters, numbers, spaces and any of the following characters _ -+ ( )
    /\

So, these values should pass the validation:

• test
• test1
• test1_
• t(e_ s)t1 i/s \good+-

And these should fail:

• t,test
• t.test
• test!
• te!@#$%st

This is the regular expression I have so far:

^[a-zA-Z0-9 _+-\/\\\(\)]+$

All the expected values above are passing, but the first two values in the should-fail list (the comma and period values) are passing as well, which is wrong!! This is very frustrating.

Please let me know what I have missed in my regular expression.

Thanks a lot in advance,

M

Answer 1

You need to escape the ‘-‘ dash in your character class

^[a-zA-Z0-9 _+\-\/\\\(\)]+$

without it you get:

A character in the range between “+” and “/” «+-/»**