timjpriebe — Mon, 20 Mar 2006 13:48:18 +0000

Here's some sample code that may be the type of thing you're looking for. Also, there's a decent guide to Perl's regular expressions here:

http://www.troubleshooters.com/codecorn/littperl/perlreg.htm

# Create blank error message so we can check at the end if there were any errors.
my $errormessage = '';


# Check the address to simply see if there's anything there
if ($address eq '')
{
	# Failed the check, so see if we need to add a comma to the error message
	if ($errormessage ne '')
	{
		$errormessage .= ", ";
	}
	$errormessage = "Address";
}

# Check the name to make sure it only uses alphabetical characters and spaces, and
# that there's at least one character (ie it's not blank)
if (!($name =~ /^[A-z\s]+$/))
{
	# Failed the check, so see if we need to add a comma to the error message
	if ($errormessage ne '')
	{
		$errormessage .= ", ";
	}
	$errormessage = "Name (blank or invalid character)";
}

# Check the phone number to make sure there's at least 7 characters, and they are 
# either numbers, dashes, open parenthesis or close parenthesis
if (!($phone =~ /^[0-9\-()]{7,}$/))
{
	# Failed the check, so see if we need to add a comma to the error message
	if ($errormessage ne '')
	{
		$errormessage .= ", ";
	}
	$errormessage = "Phone (blank or invalid format)";
}

# Check the email to make sure the beginning has valid characters and that there's at
# least one character. After that, there should be an @, then more valid characters
# (one or more), then a period, then 2-4 alphabetical characters
if (!($email =~ /^[A-z0-9_\-]+\@(A-z0-9_-]+\.)+[A-z]{2,4}$/))
{
	# Failed the check, so see if we need to add a comma to the error message
	if ($errormessage ne '')
	{
		$errormessage .= ", ";
	}
	$errormessage = "Email (blank or invalid format)";
}

if ($errormessage ne '')
{
	print 'The following fields had errors: ' . $errormessage;
	exit;
}