Assuming that you have accidentally left off a final quote, I am assuming that someone tried to get cute with a regex and dropped the ball. Here's what I think was meant:

$validation-regex="^(?s:.{0,1100})$";
[download]

The following would be an equivalent regex:

$string =~ /^.{0,1100}$/s;
[download]

The (?s:) construct turns on the appropriate modifer for the whatever in included in the parens. In this case, it appears that the author of the regex is trying to match 0 to 1100 characters (not words) and that the /s modifier was tossed in to make the dot match the newline.

Reading through perlre, you'll see that you can use the (?misx-misx:) construct to turn switches off an on for a particular section of the regex. For example, what if you're trying to match MacDonald? Those first four letters could be virtually any case, but we don't want to make the entire regex match case-insensitive as that would be inefficient. Here's on way to match it:

$last_name =~ /(?i:macd)onald/;
[download]

Cheers,
Ovid

Join the Perlmonks Setiathome Group or just click on the the link and check out our stats.

There's a maxlength attribute in HTML for text input fields, but not for textarea. If you want to limit a string to 1100 chars max after you've got it into a variable, then

$string = substr($string,0, 1100) if length $string > 1100;
[download]

oughta do. Moral of the story: not everything one does with a string ought to be implemented in regexes.

perl -e 'print "How sweet does a rose smell? "; chomp ($n = <STDIN>); 
+$rose = "smells sweet to degree $n"; *other_name = *rose; print "$oth
+er_name\n"'
[download]

Our forms (here at work) utilize javascript for limiting text. I don't think there is a perl way to do this.

despite my reservations, I am gonna post non-perl code (at least it's generated by perl).

this is a js routine that will handle it...

function checkTextAreaLen( fName, theField, maxLen )
{
  if ( theField.value.length > maxLen )
    return msgErrorMid( fName, theField, maxLen, "Please enter less th
+an ", " characters into the  \"", "\"  field. \nCurrently there are "
+ + theField.value.length + " characters in the field." );
  return true;
}
##  and here is the onChange that invokes it from a textarea, limiting
+ to 1500 chars
onChange="checkTextAreaLen(gsJobdesc,this,1500)
[download]

now I have to find a way to purge away the sin I have committed...suggestions are welcome

you really ought to doublecheck the length on the server too if that's in a form that gets submitted. a user may have javascript turned off, or, if your systems would break on too much input, a (cr|h)acker might manually send you longer input as a DOS.

point is, you should never rely on client-side code to validate forms.

anders pearson // digital samurai
personal      // http://www.columbia.edu/~anders/
weblog       // http://thraxil.dhs.org/

point is, you should never rely on client-side code to validate forms.

I wholehearetdly agree, our use of javascript in this case is to just to prevent a post if the length is out of bounds with a textarea. when the form gets posted, the real validations take place (a fun place where MS word formatting characters are sanitized and fed to oracle) via perl. We also handle forcing/restricting alpha/numerics, etc I inherited the system (on contract), but given the user requirements, I can't see how it could have been done any other way. (the requirements were specifically for popup warnings, which while annoying save posts to the busy server)

btw, this being an internal business app, we have only have to code to one browser, netscape 4.x and require javascript. a very controlled environment. there are plenty of other reasons on top of what we're discussing that would disqualify it for general net use. :-)

If all you want to do is trim the string to be 1100 characters at most, just do this:

use constant MAX_CHARS => 1100;
if ( length($str) > MAX_CHARS ) {
    $str = substr( $str, 0, MAX_CHARS );
}
[download]

# Limit the string's length
$str = substr( $str, 0, MAX_CHARS );
[download]

xoxo,
Andy

%_=split/;/,".;;n;u;e;ot;t;her;c; ".   #   Andy Lester
'Perl ;@; a;a;j;m;er;y;t;p;n;d;s;o;'.  #   http://petdance.com
"hack";print map delete$_{$_},split//,q<   andy@petdance.com   >

The length tests on this and most of the other answers in this thread are unnecessary. As the documentation for substr states:

If OFFSET and LENGTH specify a substring that is partly outside the string, only the part within the string is returned.

   MeowChow                                   
               s aamecha.s a..a\u$&owag.print

if(length $input >1100){substr($_,0,1100);} 
# delete everything after 1100 chars
[download]

(?s) - see [Ovid]'s answer
^ - beginning of string
.{0,1100} - between 0 and 1100 characters
$ end of string
[download]

And other points below:

• yes you can use javascript, but cannot *rely* on it, so always add server side check
• $string = substr($string,0, 1100) is quick solution
• or trim and add ... if you want to show it was longer, using something like <CODE>$string =~ s/^(.{0,1096}) .*$/$1.../ if length($string)>=1100);

TIMTOWTFIU

cLive ;-)

Why not test with do{use bytes; length($string);}? Or substr if you want to be forgiving and trim oversized data?

After Compline,
Zaxo