I am a frequent visitor to your blog and recently came across this article on Validating data using Regular Expressions. For a while now, I have been working on a sophisticated regular expression application and was just able to publish it this past week. Considering your interest and expertise with Flex and regular expressions, I thought you might be interested in it.

The app is called the Flex 3 Regular Expression Explorer and can be found at my blog below.

http://blog.ryanswanson.com/2008/10/introducing-flex-3-regular-expression.html

The application is similar to the Flex Component and Style Explorers created by Adobe, but I have also added a collaborative community section where people can post their own regular expression examples as well as a full-feature help panel to get novices started with the technology.

Hope you like it!

Cheers,
Ryan

p.s. Considering your obvious abilities with Flex and regular expressions, I would be very grateful if you were a contributor to the Regular Expression Explorer community! The more we work together, the more we all profit. :)

http://www.dc.turkuamk.fi/docs/gnu/rx/rx_3.html

The link also mentions how you can use inverted character classes such as the following:

[^[:space:]] - all non-whitespace characters

According to Ben Forta’s “Regular Expressions in 10 Minutes” book (First edition, page 121), the following regular expression should work for Canadian postal codes:

[ABCEGHJKLMNPRSTVXY]\d[A-Z] \d[A-Z]\d

Note that the D, F, I, O, Q, U, and Z characters are omited from the first allowed character range, but allowable in alphabetic later ranges.

Peter

Thanks for the tip/clarification! Flex (or more accurately Flash Player 9) does allow POSIX classes, as it turns out! I updated the entry above to show the POSIX style and admit to my own ignorance of the Canadian Postal system.

Peter

^[A-CEG-NPR-TVXY][[:digit:]][A-CEG-NPR-TVW-Z]( |-)?[[:digit:]][A-CEG-NPR-TVW-Z][[:digit:]]$

The above regex is more CF specific, but easy to adapt. I’m not sure if Flex allow posix classes.