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Creating a Regular Expression for Validation

Introduction to Regular Expressions

Regular expressions (regex) are a sequence of characters that forms a search pattern. They can be used to validate, search, extract and replace text.

Creating a Regular Expression for Validation

  1. Start and End: Every regex expression starts with / and ends with / . For example, /expression/ .
  2. Character Classes: You can use character classes to match any character from a specific set. For example, [abc] will match any of the characters a, b, or c.
  3. Quantifiers: Quantifiers specify how many instances of a character, group, or character class must be present in the input for a match to be found. For example, a* will match ‘a’ zero or more times.
  4. Escape special characters: To use any of these special characters literally, you’ll need to escape them using a backslash `.
  5. Predefined character classes: There are some predefined character classes like \d for digits, \s for whitespace characters and \w for word characters (letters, numbers, underscores).

Here are some useful examples:

Regular ExpressionDescription validation / match
/^[a-zA-Z]+$/Only letters (either lower-case or upper-case)
/^\d+$/Only digits
/^[a-zA-Z0-9]+$/Only alphanumeric characters
/^[\w.-]+@[\w.-]+\.\w+$/Email address
/^\d{5}$/Exactly five digits (like a U.S. ZIP code)
/^(([0-9]|[1-9][0-9]|1[0-9]{2}|2[0-4][0-9]|25[0-5]).){3}([0-9]|[1-9][0-9]|1[0-9]{2}|2[0-4][0-9]|25[0-5])$/ IPv4 address
/^[a-z0-9]+(?:-[a-z0-9]+)*$/Slug
/^(https?:\/\/)?([a-z0-9]+([-.]{1}[a-z0-9]+).[a-z]{2,5})(:[0-9]{1,5})?(\/.)?$URL Validation Pattern

Regular expressions are case-sensitive. To make your regular expression case-insensitive, you can add i at the end, like /expression/i`.

Please note that these are just basic examples. Regular expressions can get quite complex, depending on the specific validation needs. You can use tools like regexr.com to create your own expressions.

Example Regex in Gravity Forms List Field

Last updated: 24-12-2024

List Textv1.0

For this functionality to work you need to install the GravityWP - List Text Add-on.

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