I have a regular expression in PHP that looks for the date in the format of YYYY-MM-DD
What I have is: [\d]{4}-[\d]{2}-[\d]{2}
I'm using preg_match to test the date, the problem is that 2009-11-10 works, but 2009-11-1033434 works as well. It's been awhile since I've done regex, how do I ensure that it stops at the correct spot? I've tried doing /([\d]{4}-[\d]{2}-[\d]{2}){1}/, but it returns the same result.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
you're probably wanting to put anchors on the expression. i.e.
^[\d]{4}-[\d]{2}-[\d]{2}$
note the caret and dollar sign.
How do you expect your date to be terminated ?
If an end-of-line, then a following $ should do the trick.
If by a non-digit character, then a following negative assertion (?!\d) will similarly work.
What you need is anchors, specifically ^ and $. The former matches the beginning of the string, the latter matches the end.
The other point I would make is the [] are unnecessary. \d retains its meaning outside of character ranges.
So your regex should look like this: /^\d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2}$/.
You could try putting both a '^' and a '$' symbol at the start and end of your expression:
/^[\d]{4}-[\d]{2}-[\d]{2}$/
which match the start and the end of the string respectively.
[\d]{4}-[\d]{2}-[\d]{2}?
where the question mark means "non-greedy"
You probably want look ahead assertions (assuming your engine supports them, php/preg/pcre does)
Look ahead assertions (or positive assertions) allow you to say "and it should be followed by X, but X shouldn't be a part of the match). Try the following syntax
\d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2}(?=[^0-9])
The assertion is this part
(?=[^0-9])
It's saying "after my regex, the next character can't be a number"
If that doesn't get you what you want/need, post an example of your input and your PHP code that's not working. Those two items can he hugely useful in debugging these kinds of problems.