Anonymous Monk has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I am trying to validate date entry where it accepts only dates with two or four number in the year part and doesn accept anything else like five, or one or three numbers in the year part. This is the only thing I want if someone was entering a date for October 23 2004:
10/23/04 or 10/23/2004

The below isnt working. 
/^\d{1,2}\/\d{1,2}\/\d{1,4}/

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Re: Validating date
by Happy-the-monk (Canon) on May 24, 2004 at 13:42 UTC

    The regex is missing a right anchor $ for one thing... have a look into   perldoc perlre   for alternates like   (?:\d\d|\d{4}).

    Also have a look at modules like   Time::ParseDate   and the like for actually valuating the numers for dates that make sense.

    Cheers, Sören

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Re: Validating date
by dave_the_m (Monsignor) on May 24, 2004 at 13:41 UTC
    Replace the \d{1,4} with \d{2}(?:\d{2})?, ie two digits of the year followed by an optional further two digits
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