Question

See it in action!

HTML:

<input type='text' value="2012-12-30 Morning">
<input type='text' value="2012-12-30 Lunch">
<input type='text' value="2012-12-30 Dinner">
<input type='text' value="2012-12-30 Either akgalkgalkgla">
<input type='text' value="2012-12-30">
<input type='text' value="Morning">
<button>Check</button>

Javascript/jQuery:

$("button").click(function() {
    $("input")
        .filter(function() {
            return this.value.match(/[0-9]{4}-[0-9]{2}-[0-9]{2}\s[A-Za-z]+/);
        })
        .css("border", '1px solid red');

})​

I tried using the anchors ^ and $ but it doesn’t match it anymore. In the above example, it should NOT match “2012-12-30 Either akgalkgalkgla”

Here’s the regex
[0-9]{4}-[0-9]{2}-[0-9]{2}\s[A-Za-z]+

2012-12-30 Morning
2012-12-30 Lunch
2012-12-30 Dinner
2012-12-30 Either akgalkgalkgla

Update:

So ^[0-9]{4}-[0-9]{2}-[0-9]{2}\s[A-Za-z]+$ does work. I was initially trying this on regexpal, and it didn’t seem to work…

Answer 1

Adding the anchors seems to work perfectly for preventing partial matches. The contents of the first three inputs are matched, the last three are not:

$("button").click(function() {
    $("input")
        .filter(function() {
            return this.value.match(/^[0-9]{4}-[0-9]{2}-[0-9]{2}\s[A-Za-z]+$/);
        })
        .css("border", '1px solid red');
});

Here it is in action: http://jsfiddle.net/ZZYMG/4/

If you want to apply the border to all the elements that fail this test, simply invert the boolean you are returning in the filter callback:

return !this.value.match(/^[0-9]{4}-[0-9]{2}-[0-9]{2}\s[A-Za-z]+$/);