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Question

Help with a field constraint using regular expressions

Administration

Updated December 30, 2014

asked on December 30, 2014

I need to create a template field with the following rule:

The field values can be any one of the following:

XXXX (Being 1234) – All numeric

XXXX-XX (Being 1234-01) All numeric

XXXX-A (Being 1234-A) Four numeric and one alpha

Is this possible? I'm okay with the basic ones but this one is making me scratch my head.

Thanks in advance.

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Answer

APPROVED ANSWER

replied on December 30, 2014 • Show version history

Sure, it's possible. The thing you're looking for is called alternation "|" (think of it like an "OR"):

\d{4}|\d{4}-\d{2}|\d{4}-[A-Z]

This expression looks for any of the 3 cases you mentioned above (assuming you want capital letters A-Z only for that third case). This is just like taking 3 individual RegEx strings and sticking them together with OR.

Be sure to provide a clear constraint violation message to your users, because the generic one is totally uninformative.

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Replies

replied on December 30, 2014

Thanks so much Scott, I totally forgot about the alternation.

Much appreciated, happy holidays!

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Asked December 30, 2014
Updated December 30, 2014
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