Question

I have read some of the other tutorials on here about regular expressions, but I am still having trouble creating exactly what I need.

I have an onblur function that does this…

var x = $("#outputpathid").val();     
var testwhitespace = new RegExp(/\s/g);
var testdoublequotes = new RegExp(/^\"|\"$/);

if (testwhitespace.test(x) && !testdoublequotes.test(x)) {
            $("#outputPathDivWhitespace").dialog({
                title: 'Output Path contains whitespace. Click the \'Close\' button to add quotes.',
                width: 500,
                modal: true,
                resizable: false,
                buttons: {
                'Close': function() {
                        $("#outputpathid").val('"'+x+'"');
                        $(this).dialog('close');
                    }
                }
            });
        }

…I want the function to test whether x, an input field string, contains a whitespace. If it does, also check to see if there are quotes. If there are NOT quotes and it contains a space, then add quotes around the entire string. This works fine until the string has either a beginning or end quote.

I am looking for some type of ‘and’ operator to replace the pipe in the testdoublequotes var. I found that I should be using the ‘?’, but can not get it to work.

Can some please help? If you provide an answer, please explain exactly what you did so I can understand what is going on. Thanks!

Answer 1

/^".*"$/

Use .* to match <anything> in between the double quotes. . matches any character, and * matches any number of the proceeding whatever. So .* matches any number of any character.

The double quotes don’t need to be escaped, by the way. I removed the backslashes.