Inverting validates_format_of

I’ve got a regex validation on one of the inputs to my application, a
file path. Now these only ever come from trusted users
(administrators), but it would still be good to catch the most obvious
attempts at directory traversal, etc.

I’ve already got a regex that only allows \w then -, . and /. However,
I want to stop two dots in a row, so I was wondering how to make the
validation fail if it is matched, rather than pass.

Is it possible to do this, or should I be worrying about some other
regex kung foo?

On 4/12/06, David [email protected] wrote:

regex kung foo?

You can use a negative lookahead: (Untested, you’ll want to check the
syntax.)
([\w-/]|(?!.).)+
Which, unless I haven’t gotten enough sleep, should say “a word
character, a hyphen, a forward slash, or a period that isn’t followed
by another period, one or more times”

Wilson B. wrote:

On 4/12/06, David [email protected] wrote:

regex kung foo?
You can use a negative lookahead: (Untested, you’ll want to check the
syntax.)
([\w-/]|(?!.).)+

Thanks Wilson! It seems that the following works well:

/^([\w-/ ]|.(?!.))+$/

I had completely forgotten about look-arounds.

David