Question

So I’m trying to validate my text field in javascript so that it would only have one hyphen.

I managed to make it so they cannot be side by side but that’s inefficient since the user can still input the hyphen else where.

What I tried to do is this:

if (surname.indexOf("-") > 1)

{

 err += "You cannot use more than one hyphen (-) for Client Surname";

}

But that did not work. I also tried >=2 still no good.

What would you suggest looking into or trying?

Thanks.

Answer 1

if ((surname.length - surname.replace('-', '').length) >= 2) {
     err += "You cannot use more than one hyphen (-) for Client Surname";
}

Basically, take the length of the original string and compare it against the length of the string with all the hyphens removed. If the difference is 2 or more, there’s more than 1 hypen.