Regex to exclude numbers and special character except "-"

[Samiksha2]

Hi All,

I have a client script to make first letter of every word as capital and articles like 'a', 'the'. etc in small letters. But in that I need to add more conditions.

1. numbers should not allowed 

2. special character should not allowed except "-"

Client script OnChange of u_new_user

function onChange(control, oldValue, newValue, isLoading) {
if (isLoading || newValue == '') {
return;
}

var myText = newValue;
var myTextInTitleCase = toTitleCase(myText);
g_form.setValue('u_new_user, myTextInTitleCase);

function toTitleCase(e) {
var t = /^(a|an|and|as|at|but|by|en|for|if|in|of|on|or|the|to|vs?\.?|via)$/i;
return e.replace(/([^\W_]+[^\s-]*) */g,
function(e, n, r, i) {
return r > 0 && r + n.length !== i.length && n.search(t) > -1 && i.charAt(r - 2) !== ":" && i.charAt(r - 1).search(/[^\s-]/) < 0 ? e.toLowerCase() : n.substr(1).search(/[A-Z]|\../) > -1 ? e : e.charAt(0).toUpperCase() + e.substr(1);
}
);
}

}

Thanks!

[Claude DAmico]

https://regex101.com/ is really nice for testing regex patterns. Using that site, I came up with /[^a-zA-Z0-9-]/gm as the regex pattern. The site also provides an area to test the expression and an explanation of how it is evaluating.

Match a single character not present in the list below [^a-zA-Z0-9-]

a-z matches a single character in the range between a and z (case sensitive)

A-Z matches a single character in the range between A and Z (case sensitive)

0-9 matches a single character in the range between 0 and 9 (case sensitive)

- matches the character - literally (case sensitive)

Global pattern flags

g modifier: global. All matches (don't return after first match)

m modifier: multi line. Causes ^ and $ to match the begin/end of each line (not only begin/end of string)

[Samiksha2]

Thanks @Claude DAmico this is awesome.

But how I can add this expression in my code?

[Claude DAmico]

How do you want to handle when those characters exist? You stated they should not be allowed, but there are options. Remove, replace, return a message to the user and clear the value, etc.?

For example: I want "a new 123 brown cat jumped over THE - lazy, brown dog." to display as "A New Brown Cat Jumped Over the - Lazy Brown Dog" so just replace values as needed.

var myText = "a new 123 brown cat jumped over THE - lazy, brown dog."; //this would actually be newValue in your case
var myTextInTitleCase = toTitleCase(myText);
gs.info(myTextInTitleCase);
//g_form.setValue('u_new_user, myTextInTitleCase);

function toTitleCase(e) {
     var t = /^(a|an|and|as|at|but|by|en|for|if|in|of|on|or|the|to|vs?\.?|via)$/i;
     newText = e.replace(/([^\W_]+[^\s-]*)*/g, function(e, n, r, i) {/*gs.info("e is " + e); gs.info("n is " + n); gs.info("r is " + r); gs.info("i is " + i); */return r > 0 && r + n.length !== i.length && n.search(t) > -1 && i.charAt(r - 2) !== ":" && i.charAt(r - 1).search(/[^\s-]/) < 0 ? e.toLowerCase() : n.substr(1).search(/[A-Z]|\../) > -1 ? e : e.charAt(0).toUpperCase() + e.substr(1);});
     newText2 = newText.replace(/([^a-zA-Z-]+[\s])/g," ");
     return newText2;
}