Matching emails separated by commas in Ruby - ruby-on-rails

I want to match emails separated by a comma like this :
'a#a.com, b#b.com, c#c.com'
I'm would like to reuse the regex defined in the Devise gem :
/\A[^#\s]+#([^#\s]+\.)+[^#\s]+\z/
I know that I won't be RFC2822 compliant but I don't care because I only need a very simple email validation.
My attempt to match the emails separated by commas is the following :
/\A(([^#\s]+#([^#\s]+\.)+[^#\s]+),)*\s([^#\s]+#([^#\s]+\.)+[^#\s]+)\z/
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ ^^ ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
everything like 'a#a.com,' spaces last element 'c#c.com'
many times
Unfortunately this is not working as expected. It is matching string like this (note the trailing comma) :
a#a.com, b#b.com, c#c.com,
Could someone help me with this please?

You are only matching the space after the last comma, move the \s to the group that is repeating. Also as Platinum Azure mentioned [^#\s] includes commas you can avoid this by changing it to [^#\s,]
/\A(([^#\s]+#([^#\s]+\.)+[^#\s,]+),\s)*([^#\s]+#([^#\s,]+\.)+[^#\s,]+)\z/

Related

Difficulty applying a Regex to a Rails View. Should I make it a helper method?

I am trying to apply the following regex to one of my views:
^([^\s]+)\s+
This is to remove any string of consecutive non-whitespace characters including any white space characters that follow from the start of the line (remove everything except the first word). I have input it on Rubular and it works.
I was wondering how I would be able to apply it to my rails project. Would I create a rails helper method? So far I have tested it in irb and it is not returning the right value:
I would like to know how I can fix my method and if making it a helper method is the right approach. Thank you very much for your help guys!
The =~ operator matches the regular expression against a string, and it returns either the offset of the match from the string if it is found, otherwise nil.
You could either try it with String.match and work with the match data.
like
str.match(^([^\s]+)\s+)
or you don't use regex for readability. Split the string on spaces and return and array of the words and take the first one, like:
str.split(' ').first

URL query string has a comma in the string

I am having an issue with a URL query string and I believe the issue is that my parameter sometimes has a comma in it.
What happens is I have a query string that is generated from a list of group names so that my string looks something like:
Group=GroupName1,GroupName2,GroupName3
While doing some testing I noticed that some of my groups are not being displayed on the page even though they are in the query string. Then I noticed that the groups that are not showing are those that have a comma in the name. For example:
Group=People,%20Places%20and%20Stuff
Obviously the query string gets parsed looking for 'People' as a group and 'Places and Stuff' as a group. This is an issue because the group is 'People, Places and Stuff'. I don't have any control over the group names so they cannot be changed to not include commas. I tried to encode the comma in the string using %2C however that had no impact.
I did some searching but I couldn't find anything other than a suggestion about changing the server so that the delimiter isn't a comma but I don't have the ability to that. Any other solution or am I stuck?
After doing a bunch of hunting I finally found the answer.
I was on the right track encoding the comma as %2C however this has to be preceded by an escape character of %5C. Therefore the url query string would be the following:
Group=People%5C%2C%20Places%20and%20Stuff

Replace a exact string using Regex in ruby

Consider the the following text
The capital asset as defined in section 2(14) is an exhaustive definition which encompasses all properties of any kind with certain exceptions but the key word is that the property should be "held" section 2.
Now I want to find section 2, for the same I have written the following Regex:
/\bsection+\.*\s+2\b/i
But it is also matching section 2 of section 2(14). I just want it to only match the exact text, not the part of text which is matching with the regex. I know I need to modify the regex, but what are the changes required?
Try with \bsection+\.*\s+2([ .,;?|!])/i . This will only match with section 2 if it is followed by a space or a punctuation mark different than (.
/\bsection+.*\s+2\b([[:punct:]]|\s/
basically you would want the word to end with whitespace or a punctuation.

Substitute characters and truncate Email using ***

How do one code an email, say, alibaba#gmail.com to a***a#g***l.c*m in ruby on rails?
I found this when I tried to recover my password to my gmail account.
If you have the email already split into address and domain this is much easier. But to do that its simply:
email = 'alibaba#gmail.com'
address, domain = email.split('#')
If you don't care about the character count between the first and last of each token:
"#{address[0]}***#{address[-1]}"
for the a**a before the # and similar can be done for the domain but using split on the . character:
working_domain = domain.split('.')
"#{working_domain[0][0]}***#{working_domain[0][-1]}.#{working_domain[1][0]}*#{working_domain[1][-1]}"
That's a pretty ugly way to do it and its not very DRY and doesnt care about character counts. You should be able to encapsulate all of this into a function or 3 and make this simpler to use.
From the example you give in the question ("alibaba#gmail.com" => "a***a#g***l.c*m"), it appears you don't need the number of *'s to match the number of replaced characters. If that's the case, you can solve this with a simple regex substitution, no splitting or parsing of the address necessary:
email = 'alibaba#gmail.com'
email.gsub(/(?<=[\w\d])[\w\d]+(?=[\w\d])/, "**")
# => "a**a#g**l.c**m"
Breaking down that regex, just for clarity: [\w\d]+ matches strings of alphanumeric characters, excluding one alphanumeric to the left ((?<=[\w\d])) and another to the right ((?=[\w\d])) of each matched group, and replaces each match with "**".
I hope this helps.

Rails validates_format_of

I want to use validates_format_of to validate a comma separated string with only letters (small and caps), and numbers.
So.
example1, example2, 22example44, ex24
not:
^&*, <> , asfasfsdafas<#%$#
Basically I want to have users enter comma separated words(incl numbers) without special characters.
I'll use it to validate tags from acts_as_taggable_on. (i don't want to be a valid tag for example.
Thanks in advance.
You can always test out regular expressions at rubular, you would find that both tiftiks and Tims regular expressions work albeit with some strange edge cases with whitespace.
Tim's solution can be extended to include leading and trailing whitespace and that should then do what you want as follows :-
^\s*[A-Za-z0-9]+(\s*,\s*[A-Za-z0-9]+)*\s*$
Presumably when you have validated the input string you will want to turn it into an array of tags to iterate over. You can do this as follows :-
array_var = string_var.delete(' ').split(',')
^([a-zA-Z0-9]+,\s*)*[a-zA-Z0-9]+$
Note that this regex doesn't match values with whitespace, so it won't match multiple words like "abc xyz, fgh qwe". It matches any amount of whitespace after commas. You might not need ^ or $ if validates_format_of tries to match the whole string, I've never used Rails so I don't know about that.
^[A-Za-z0-9]+([ \t]*,[ \t]*[A-Za-z0-9]+)*$
should match a CSV line that only contains those characters, whether it's just one value or many.

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