Regex & Special Characters

I needed a quick means of limiting characters in user-provided form data throughout my application, so I came up with the following regex script which can be modified on a per-field basis for whatever characters I want a given field to support. As a point of reference I wanted to start by coming up with a default, or a means of allowing standard characters that might appear in an English string, but I'm having a little problem. Here is what I came up with:
<CFIF refind("[^A-Za-z0-9!\@\##\$%\&\*-_\+:',\?\./]", form.variable_name, 1) GT 0>
...code to execute here...
</CFIF>
This regex script essentially allows for letters, numbers, and: ! @ # $ % & * - _ + : ' ? . /
In testing this, I tried entering various special characters, and in all cases I tested the regex script caught anything not in my list.
That is, until I used the "^" symbol. That flew right through. Then I discovered "[" and "]" did too. If these were, who knows what else would?
So that brings me here. I am not a fan of writing regex scripts, do it so infrequently, and thus are not very savvy at it.
Am I doing something wrong? Is there a better way to do this perhaps?

I recommend checking out the software package The RegEx Coach (http://weitz.de/regex-coach/). It provides a simple, great interface for writing and testing regular expression patterns. Using something like that should allow you to see visually that your problem is.

Similar Messages

A problem with regex and special characters

Hello,
I am using regex in my application but i have a problem with special characters. Here is the explanation of what i am doing:
I have a certain piece of text that i want to parse and replace every occurrence of a given word with some sort of a tag which have the word found inside it.
so that: go Going Go to gOschool by bus and to learn and to play GO Go
and i need to replace the word "go" (case insensitive and only at word boundaries) should be:
*<start>go<end> Going <start>Go<end> to gOschool by bus and to learn and to play <start>GO<end> <start>Go<end>*
Consider the following code and call the method with the parameter"go?"
The Matcher finds a weird match at the word "G?oing" with only the letter G !!!
It also ignores the "?" in the pattern completely.
Any clue of what is happening i would be very grateful...
private static String replaceMatches(String strToFind)
        String resultArticle="";
        String article = " "+"go? G?oing Go? to gOschool by bus and to learn and to play GO? Go?*"+" ";
        strToFind = "\\b"+ strToFind +"\\b";
        String linkPart1= "<start>";
        String linkPart2 = "<end>";
        Pattern p = null;
        try{
            p=Pattern.compile(strToFind, Pattern.CASE_INSENSITIVE);
        Matcher m = p.matcher(article);
        String[] res = p.split(article);
        int i=0;
        //System.out.println("result of split: "+res.length );
        while(m.find())
            resultArticle+=(res[i]+" ");
            resultArticle+=linkPart1;
            resultArticle+=m.group().trim();
            resultArticle+=(linkPart2+" ");
            i++;
        if(i<res.length)
            resultArticle+=res;
//System.out.println("result of match: " + i);
System.out.println(article);
//System.out.println(resultArticle.trim()+scripts);
catch(PatternSyntaxException ex){}
return resultArticle.trim();
}Thanks

tarek.mamdouh wrote:
because split will not work when trying to replace the first word if i don't append a space at the beginning.Split doesn't work anyway. And my question wasn't why do you add spaces (which you really don't need to do), but why do you do them with " " + "go" rather than just " go"
replaceAll will replace all the occurrences in the text with only one word. without taking into consideration the case of the word i need to replace.No.
>
If i use replacaAll(article, strToFind) the output will be:
<start>go?<end> G?oing <start>go?<end> to gOschool by bus and to learn and to play <start>go?<end> <start>go?<end>No. I showed you the actual output of an actual replaceAll.
which is not what i want as i need to keep the case of the words i am replacingThe replaceAll I showed you does that.
Please study the examples given and read the docs carefully rather than making claims based on inaccurate guesses.

Remove all the special characters using java.util.regex

Hi,
How to remove the all the special characters in a String[] using regex, i have the following:-
public class RegExpTest {
     private static String removeSplCharactersForNumber(String[] number) {
          String number= null;
          Matcher m = null;
               Pattern p = Pattern.compile("\\!\\@\\#\\$\\%\\^\\&\\*\$\$\\_\\+\\-\\{\\}\\|\\;\\\\\\'////\\,\\.\\?\\<\\>\\[\\]");
               for (int i = 0; i < number.length; i++) {
               m = p.matcher(number);
               if (m.find()) {
                    number= m.replaceAll("");
               System.out.println("Final Number is:::"+number);
               return number;
          public static void main(String args[]){
               String[] str = {"raghav!@#$%^&*()_+"};
               RegExpTest regExpTest = new RegExpTest();
               regExpTest.removeSplCharactersForNumber(str);
This code is not working and m.find() is "false", here i want the output to be raghav for the entered string array, not only that it should remove all the special characters for a entered string[]. Is there a simple way to do this to remove all the special characters for a given string[]? More importantly the "spaces" (treated as a spl. character), should be removed as well. Please do provide a solution to this.
Thanks

You don't need the find(). Just use the replaceAll() on each element of the String[] i.e.
String[] values = ...
for (int i = 0; i < values.length; i++)
    values[i] = p.matcher(values).replaceAll("");
}I can't understand your regex since the forum software has mangled it but you just need to add a space to the set of chars to remove. When you post code, surround it with CODE tags then the forum software won't mangle it.

How to use Special Characters in CONCAT function or another form with Xquer

Hello everyone
I'm using PS3 OEPE within message flow (proxy)and I'm using Xquery.
I'm using the CONCAT function, but this does not allow me to concatenate special characters not allowed, for example:
I want to concatenate these strings:
String1 = “&lt;get-person&gt;&lt;id-person&;gt;”
String2 = “123”
String3 = “&lt;/id-person&;gt; &lt;/get-person&gt;”
I want to represent characters regex. It means no XML characters
Someone knows some way, any function that allows me to concatenate in OSB these values with Xquery?
Edited by: chromosoma on Sep 5, 2012 5:59 PM

Hi,
It seems to me you're doing things in the most complicated way possible...
Firstly, you should use codepoints-to-string not the reverse... Secondly, the function work with decimals, not hexa
http://www.xqueryfunctions.com/xq/fn_codepoints-to-string.html
http://www.xqueryfunctions.com/xq/fn_string-to-codepoints.html
This works...
concat(codepoints-to-string(38),'lt',codepoints-to-string(59),'get-person')But this also works... Note that I've inserted a space between the & and the lt so the forum formatting can show it...
let
$String1 := "& lt;get-person& gt;& lt;id-person& gt;",
$String2 := "123",
$String3 := "& lt;/id-person& gt;& lt;/get-person& gt;"
return
concat($String1,$String2,$String3)And, finally this also works... So what's the reason for escaping < and > with &lt and &gt; and why codepoints?
let
$String1 := "<get-person><id-person>",
$String2 := "123",
$String3 := "</id-person></get-person>"
return
concat($String1,$String2,$String3)Cheers,
Vlad

RegExp for excluding special characters in a string.

Hi All,
Im using Flex RegExpValidator. Can anyone suggest me the correct expression to validate this condition?....
I have tried this expression :----- /^[^///\/</>/?/*&]+$/...But in this it is also negating the alphabets.Also I have tried with opposite condition that in the String we should have alphabets and the expression is:-- ([a-z]|[A-Z]|[0-9]|[ ]|[-]|[_])*..... Please can anyone help me on this.
Thanks in advanced to all.
Munira

sorry but you are posting things back that do not make any sense
what do you mean with the below comment?
munira06 wrote:
Yes you are correct ,but I have tried this with single special character
say
Re: RegExp for excluding special characters in a string.
here is a sample app taken from the live docs
using ^[a-zA-Z0-9 \-_]*$ as the regex accepts all characters from a-z, A-Z, 0-9 - [space] and_
run the example tell me what regex you are using and what test strings fail when they should pass or pass when they should fail
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

<s:Application xmlns:fx="http://ns.adobe.com/mxml/2009"
        xmlns:s="library://ns.adobe.com/flex/spark"
        xmlns:mx="library://ns.adobe.com/flex/mx">
    <fx:Script>
        <![CDATA[
            import mx.events.ValidationResultEvent;
            import mx.validators.*;
            // Write the results to the
            private function handleResult(eventObj:ValidationResultEvent):void {
                if (eventObj.type == ValidationResultEvent.VALID) {
                    // For valid events, the results Array contains
                    // RegExpValidationResult objects.
                    var xResult:RegExpValidationResult;
                    reResults.text = "";
                    for (var i:uint = 0; i < eventObj.results.length; i++) {
                        xResult = eventObj.results[i];
                        reResults.text=reResults.text + xResult.matchedIndex + " " + xResult.matchedString + "\n";
                } else {
                    reResults.text = "";
        ]]>
    </fx:Script>
    <fx:Declarations>
        <mx:RegExpValidator id="regExpV"
                source="{regex_text}" property="text"
                flags="g" expression="{regex.text}"
                valid="handleResult(event)"
                invalid="handleResult(event)"
                trigger="{myButton}"
                triggerEvent="click"/>
    </fx:Declarations>
    <s:Panel title="RegExpValidator Example"
            width="75%" height="75%"
            horizontalCenter="0" verticalCenter="0">
        <s:VGroup left="10" right="10" top="10" bottom="10">
            <s:Label width="100%" text="Instructions:"/>
            <s:Label width="100%" text="1. Enter text to search. By default, enter a string containing the letters ABC in sequence followed by any digit."/>
            <s:Label width="100%" text="2. Enter the regular expression. By default, enter ABC\d."/>
            <s:Label width="100%" text="3. Click the Button control to trigger the validation."/>
            <s:Label width="100%" text="4. The results show the index in the text where the matching pattern begins, and the matching pattern. "/>
            <mx:Form>
                <mx:FormItem label="Enter text:">
                    <s:TextInput id="regex_text" text="xxxxABC4xxx" width="100%"/>
                </mx:FormItem>
                <mx:FormItem label="Enter regular expression:">
                    <s:TextInput id="regex" text="ABC\d" width="100%"/>
                </mx:FormItem>
                <mx:FormItem label="Results:">
                    <s:TextInput id="reResults" width="100%"/>
                </mx:FormItem>
                <mx:FormItem >
                    <s:Button id="myButton" label="Validate"/>
                </mx:FormItem>
            </mx:Form>
        </s:VGroup>
    </s:Panel>
</s:Application>

Replace all special characters in a String with underscore

I have a String which contains some special characters even(!,$,@,*....).
I need to replace all the special characters with _ in my String. I do have an idea of using String.replace() and analogous forms, but I would be thankful if anyone can suggest me of a better and an efficient way.
regards,
fun_one

Kaj,
Thx for your earnest reply. I did have a peep into the API on this method. But the regular expression that I need to use here was beyond my understanding. It did specify some regex that I put to use (something like myString("\D","_"), assuming that I need to replace all non-digit characters ), but it really did not help me getting the result.
Would you spare some code for me reg. the usage of regular expressions in such a scenario?
cheers,
fun_one

Replace Special Characters in a string + XQUERY

Hi All,
I am using the following replace function to replace the special characters in my XQUERY.
*replace($string1, '[&"-*;-`!|:,¿/{}@#$%^*~()_+-]', ' ')*
Fortunately it is replacing all the special characters. But the only problem here is it is even replacing capitol letters in to spaces, which I don't want.
Please help me out!!

Hi
<<< What did u change >?> I dont see any change with the Regex ? >>
if you observe in the modified function, he just removed (*) inside the replace funtion.
Thanks
Shankar AUNV

Special Characters in a username cause login problem

We have got SSO setup on our application and have successfully been testing away, until we tried logging in with an account which has a '+' character in the username. We are authenticating and getting an SSO token but the login process then fails with a "User has no profile in this organization" message. This call http://forums.sun.com/thread.jspa?messageID=9820513 talks about a workaround that ignores the Profile service which does get us logged in, but in the longer term I need to be able to use this functionality to set conditions per URL policy.
Has anybody come across other probelms with usernames containing special characters? Is there some kind of encoding switch I need to turn on somewhere.
Cheers and TIA for your help.

Hi
<<< What did u change >?> I dont see any change with the Regex ? >>
if you observe in the modified function, he just removed (*) inside the replace funtion.
Thanks
Shankar AUNV

Escape special characters in url for redirection

In my web page, I want all the characters of the URL to be lower case. For that I created the following method:
private bool UrlFormatoCorrecto(string url)
bool formatoCorrecto = true;
bool upperCa = url.Any(c => char.IsUpper(c));
if (url.Any(c => char.IsUpper(c)))
formatoCorrecto = false;
if (url.Contains(" ") || url.Contains("+"))
formatoCorrecto = false;
return formatoCorrecto;
This works like a charm until a special character appears. The url that I get then will be the following:
http://localhost/web/coches/proven%C3%A7a-aribau,-08036-barcelona,-barcelona
So I have upper case characters. When I redirect it using the following code:
if (!UrlFormatoCorrecto(urlActual))
Response.RedirectPermanent(urlActual.Replace(" ", "-").Replace("+", "-").ToLower());
I get the code again with the same URL with upper case. How can I escape the special characters so they won't bother me anytime I want to make the redirection?

hello,
you could escape special caracters with :
Regex.Escape Method
Regards
Cédric

Code to Check for Special Characters \/:*?" | in the given String

Hi All,
I need a java code to verify if the given string contains the Special Characters like \/:*?"<>|
thanks
krishnaveni

http://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/util/regex/Pattern.html
bye
TPD

JAVA Regex Illegal Characters

Hello - I am trying to find a list of all illegal characters which have to be escaped in JAVA Regex pattern matching but I cannot find a complete list.
Also I understand that when doing the replaceall function that there is a special list of characters which can't be used for that as well, which also have to be escaped differently.
If anyone has access to a full complete list as to when to escape and how I would greatly appreciated it!
Thanks,
Dan

I also noticed this below link:
http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/extra/regex/literals.html
It said the following characters are meta-characters in regex API:
( [ { \ ^ $ | ) ? * + .
But it also says the below:
Note: In certain situations the special characters listed above will not be treated as metacharacters. You'll encounter this as you learn more about how regular expressions are constructed. You can, however, use this list to check whether or not a specific character will ever be considered a metacharacter. For example, the characters ! @ and # never carry a special meaning.
Does anyone know if there would be any issues if I escaped when a character didn't need to be escaped?

Regular expression: check for the presence of special characters.

I have the following requirement:
I need to check for the presence of the following characters in a keyword: @, #, > if any of these characters are present, then they need to be stripped off, before going further. Please let me know the regular expression to check for these characters.

I am trying to extend the same logic for the following characters:
.,?!@#%^&*()-~<>[]{}\+=`©® . here is the code fragment:
Pattern kValidator = Pattern.compile("[\\.,\\\\?!@#%^&*()-~<>[]{}\\+=\\`©®]");
Matcher kMatcher = kValidator.matcher(keyWord);
if (kMatcher.find(0)) {
keyWord = keyWord.replaceAll("[.,\\\\?!@#%^&*()-~<>[]{}\\+=\\`©®]", " ");
}I get the following error. This error is from the weblogic command window. I dont understand these special characters.
Error:
28 Oct 2008 12:27:48 | INFO | SearchController   | Exception while fetching search results in controller:Unclosed character class near index
39
[\.,\ΓÇÿ\ΓÇ£?!@#%^&*()-~<>[]{}\+=\`┬⌐┬«]
                                       ^
java.util.regex.PatternSyntaxException: Unclosed character class near index 39
[\.,\ΓÇÿ\ΓÇ£?!@#%^&*()-~<>[]{}\+=\`┬⌐┬«]
                                       ^
        at java.util.regex.Pattern.error(Pattern.java:1650)
        at java.util.regex.Pattern.clazz(Pattern.java:2199)
        at java.util.regex.Pattern.sequence(Pattern.java:1727)
        at java.util.regex.Pattern.expr(Pattern.java:1687)
        at java.util.regex.Pattern.compile(Pattern.java:1397)
        at java.util.regex.Pattern.<init>(Pattern.java:1124)
        at java.util.regex.Pattern.compile(Pattern.java:817)

Restrict Special Characters in String Fields

Hello,
My Jdev version is 11.1.1.6 using ADF BC and ADF Faces as technology stack.
I have a requirement to restrict special characters, html tags as input in String/Varchar2 fields.
I have couple of thoughts that can be used in application but not sure which is the best approach:
1. Implement <af:validateRegExp pattern="regular Exp"> inside <af:inputText> component
2. Implement Entity based validator using Regular Expression
Apart from picking the best out of above two, I would like to know if there is a better way to implement this validation.
My application has custom framework extn classes and all Entities/View Objects extend those. Is there a possibility to implement this type of validation at some central place.
I would highly appreciate expert inputs here.
Thanks,
Jai

Hi,
the answer to your question is *"use both"*. The entity level would be enough but then would make people subniitting a request afte which they see an error The RegEx validator in ADF Faces handles problems on the client side and thus before a submit is sent to the server (where it then would be also checked using server side validation in ADF Faces). Why not using RegEx validation in ADF faces alone? Because there are potentially many views accessing your entity through view objects and if only one developer forgets the RegEx validator you would be screwed.
Frank

Vbscript to rename files and replace special characters

Dear Exprt,
would you please help to add addtional requirement for rename and replace special characters for file
by the below script i can re name.
strAnswer = InputBox("Please enter folder location to rename files:", _
"File rename")
strfilenm = InputBox("Enter name:", _
"Rename Files")
Set FSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
Sub visitFolder(folderVar)
For Each fileToRename In folderVar.Files
fileToRename.Name = strfilenm & fileToRename.Name
Next
For Each folderToVisit In folderVar.SubFolders
visitFolder(folderToVisit)
Next
End Sub
If FSO.FolderExists(strAnswer) Then
visitFolder(FSO.getFolder(strAnswer))
End If
[email protected]

Thx would you please look below what wrong in its run nothing happend no error
strAnswer = InputBox("Please enter folder location to rename files:", _
"Test")
strfilenm = InputBox("Enter name:", _
"Rename Files")
Set FSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
Set regEx = New RegExp
'Your pattern here
Select Case tmpChar
Case "&"
changeTo = " and "
Case "/"
changeTo = "_"
Case Else
changeTo = " "
End Select
regEx.Pattern = tmpChar
Sub visitFolder(folderVar)
For Each fileToRename In folderVar.Files
fileToRename.Name = strfilenm & fileToRename.Name
fileToRename.Name = regEx.Replace(fileToRename.Name, tmpChar)
Next
For Each folderToVisit In folderVar.SubFolders
visitFolder(folderToVisit)
Next
End Sub
[email protected]

XML Publisher report not printing excel output due to special characters

Hello,
I am trying to create a xml publisher report which should display the output in excel. But the program completes with a warning status and the output is displayed as XML instead of excel, with some errors "An invalid character was found in text content. Error processing resource " and i think these errors are due to the special characters(eg: city/province - A Coruña, Cáceres). If i give rownum < 10 in my query, where there are no such characters it works fine and i am getting an excel output.
Tried changing the XML encoding and it doesn't help (both mentioned below)
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
Do anyone have a solution for this
Thanks in advance
Edited by: user10317098 on Jan 16, 2012 10:58 AM

Hi,
Check this links that might help you..
https://forums.oracle.com/thread/1018488
http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E10091_01/doc/bip.1013/e05000/toc.htm
Here the Exact solution from Oracle
In the XML PUBLISHER ADMINISTRATOR Resp..
Click the administration..
then Click HTML Output
Then in the Base Image URI Give the url of your application for example
http://Test.Test.com:8000/OA_MEDIA/
And then
Image File Directory give this as per your application setup
/u01/app/oracle/apps/apps_st/comn/java/classes/oracle/apps/media/
Thanks & Regards
Srikkanth.M

Regex & Special Characters

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