Validating no spaces in field

Rails
1

All,

I’ve never been much of a regex wrangler, and learning rails at the
same time isn’t helping.

I want to create a validation that fails if a user tries to create a
username with spaces. But I can’t seem to get the right
validates_format_of regex going.

Can anyone help with this simple question?

Thanks!
Andrew

2

Hi,

you can simply try yourString.include?(" ") with the params[:yourString]
if it is a form parameter.

Sayoyo

[email protected] wrote:

All,

I’ve never been much of a regex wrangler, and learning rails at the
same time isn’t helping.

I want to create a validation that fails if a user tries to create a
username with spaces. But I can’t seem to get the right
validates_format_of regex going.

Can anyone help with this simple question?

Thanks!
Andrew

3

validates_format_of :username, :with => /^\S+$/

but that’s still probably too open for a username (it’ll allow “u
$ern4m3” for instance)

Most of the time, usernames are restricted to:

validates_format_of :username, :with => /^[a-zA-Z][a-z0-9A-Z]{2,10}$/

(usernames starting with a letter, followed by 2 or more letters or
digits up to 10, min username length = 3, max username length = 11)

here are a few links that explain the syntax concisely:

On Mar 12, 9:54 pm, “[email protected]”

4

While I think that your regex is smokin’ hot, I do think you might be
better
served [at least on the error messages front] by two validations there:

validates_format_of :username, :with => /^[a-zA-Z][a-z0-9A-Z]*$/,
:message
=> “can only contain letters and numbers” # Or something
validates_length_of, :minimum => 2, :maximum => 10, :too_short => “must
be
at least 2 characters”, :too_long => “cannot be longer than 10
characters”

that way you’ll have separate error messages for each problem rather
than
having to lump them all in together. You way does work though. I’m
just
trying to offer a helpful hint.

RSL

On 3/12/07, eden li [email protected] wrote:

validates_format_of :username, :with => /^[a-zA-Z][a-z0-9A-Z]{2,10}$/

5

Russell,

I agree and my model already had a validates_length_of so I modified
the proposed regex to eliminate the length check.

Discussing this with my partner we decided to allow numbers, letters,
and underscore () so I am going to try the regex
/^[a-zA-Z0-9]*$/

We don’t care if the first character is a letter, number, or
underscore, only that these are the only characters allowed anywhere
in the username. So “_username”, “user_name”, and “1user_name” should
all be valid.

Think this should work? I don’t have access to the site to test it
until I get home tonight.

I had never noticed that validates_length_of supports two error
messages, one for too short, and one for too long. I’ll have to
implement that in my code tonight as well.

Now if I could only find a non-ugly way to sort the error messages so
they match the order of the form fields I’d be all set. :frowning:

6

It’s not [that] hard to roll your own version of error_messages_on.
Something like

def error_messages_hacked(instance, *order)
return if instance.errors.empty?
dummy = order.map do |attribute|
“#{instance} #{instance.errors_on(attribute)}”
end.flatten

Do any HTML styling you want on dummy

which will be a collection of error message strings

end

<%= error_messages_hacked @user, :name, :email, :whatever -%>

That’s pretty not ugly, right?

7

Thank you so much, that did the trick perfectly!

And double thanks for teaching a man to fish. I think I might be able
to write a simple regex of my own now!

Thanks again!!!

—A