in reply to Stumped by regex

Does it _need_ to be one regex? You might be better of checking the length first? Something like this...?

UPDATE: See replies.... 

if (length($name) <= 20 and $name =~ m/^\w+\s(\w+\s)?\w+$/i) {
    print "okay\n";
}

[download]

By the way, your character restriction doesn't work because you can match up to three characters in one go within the parentheses, so your upper limit here is actually 60.

---
my name's not Keith, and I'm not reasonable.

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Re^2: Stumped by regex
by brickwall (Acolyte) on Dec 06, 2006 at 15:18 UTC
    Great, but wouldnt your regex also allow numbers to be entered, which i dont want Thanks
[reply]
      yup, dumb mistake by me. Also though, I assumed there was a first name here too. So the above regex allows an additional space that it shouldn't. You're probably okay with just the following... 
      $name =~ m/^[a-z]+\s?[a-z]+$/i

      [download]
      ...although this does force a minimum length of 2.

      Having said this, if I'd seen JediWizard's reply, I wouldn't have posted mine. I think he nailed it first time (++).

      ---
      my name's not Keith, and I'm not reasonable.
[reply]
[d/l]

        You might even prefer [[:alpha:]]+ instead of hard coding a-z in case you ever need to work in non-ASCII-betic locales.</pedant>

[reply]
[d/l]

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