Re: OT - Validating Regular Expression in java

Hi all,

I know it's not directly the purpose of this list, so I apologize, but
I think you guys are the ones who can help me :-)

My web site offers a search which supports regular expression (POSIX).
I'm looking for a way to validate the regular expression in the
application before sending it the the DB. For now Postgresql throwing
an error on invalid regular expression.

I tried with the gnu-regexp frameworks, It works partly but it's not
full proof since an invalid caracter class like [[:awefaewf:]]* is not
flagged as an error but causes an error with Postgresql.

Any help on this matter will be appreciated. I'm sure it's a common
problem and have been addressed before ... I searched but haven't found
the answer yet.

Thanks for your help

/David

I

On Thu, 4 Nov 2004, David Gagnon wrote:

> I think you guys are the ones who can help me :-)
>
> My web site offers a search which supports regular expression (POSIX).
> I'm looking for a way to validate the regular expression in the
> application before sending it the the DB. For now Postgresql throwing
> an error on invalid regular expression.

I'd say just go ahead and send it to the db. Getting a java regex package
to match up *exactly* with pg's seems rather unlikely. Why not just let
pg tell you if it was valid or not? I'm guessing you want to detect regex
errors from other sql errors, but SQLException.getSQLState() should do
that for 7.4+ servers.

Kris Jurka