Question

I’m trying to validate an input field by making sure that only text, spaces and numbers can be inputted. I thought that the easiest way to do this would be using a Regular Expression by doing something like this:

function checkVal() {
var input = document.getElementById("input").value; 
if (input.match(/[a-zA-Z0-9]+$/) == null) {
    alert("error");
    }
}

More specifically I need to make sure that the underscore character isn’t within this field (this is really important). From testing this it doesn’t seem to be working properly but I think this is more so because I’m maybe using a regular expression for the wrong purpose and not because it’s syntactically incorrect.

Would it just be easier for me to write a function to exclude the “underscore” character when typing in that input box?

EDIT: Just to make this a bit clearer, I only want to accept letter, numbers and spaces.

Answer 1

Don’t forget to include the beginning of the string, ^ (and the space):

/^[a-zA-Z0-9 ]+$/