Fellow monks,

I'm in need of a bit of help with this.

I'm trying to work out a regular expression for untainting data passed through a form.

Here's what I have: 

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
my $x = 'Ms a smith jr';

print "Name valid\n" if $x =~ m/^(\s+)?(M(s|rs?|iss)\.?)?\s+([A-Z]+)(\
+.)?(\s+)([A-Z]+)(\s+)?([A-Z]+)?$/i;

[download]

The part that has me wondering is checking for Mr/Mrs/Ms/Miss. Originally I had something along the lines of: (M(r?s?|iss)) which worked for all the 4 salutation cases, but that matched 'M' by itself as well.

My question is this: is there a way to check for this that is cleaner than the mess I have there now? I think I've taken in to account all (American) salutations ( if anyone does even use those on web forms ) and Jr's, III's, etc...

Thanks in advance!

There is no emoticon for what I'm feeling now.

In reply to Untainting name data from form by Popcorn Dave

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