Regular Expression for file path validation

Question

I can't seem to find a Regular Expression for javascript that will test for the following cases:

• c:\temp
• D:\directoryname\testing\
• \john-desktop\tempdir\

You can see what I'm going for. I just need it to validate a file path. But it seems like all the expressions I've found, don't work for javascript.

Thank you in advance.

John

Answer 1

Try this:

([a-zA-Z]:)?(\\[a-zA-Z0-9_-]+)+\\?

EDIT:

@Bart made me think about this regexp. This one should work nice for windows' paths.

^([a-zA-Z]:)?(\\[^<>:"/\\|?*]+)+\\?$

Answer 2

You could start with:

^([a-zA-Z]:)?(\\[a-zA-Z0-9_\-]+)+\\?

This matches all your samples.

Answer 3

I think this will work:

var reg = new RegExp("^(?>[a-z]:)?(?>\\|/)?([^\\/?%*:|\"<>\r\n]+(?>\\|/)?)+$", "i");

I've just excluded all(?) invalid characters in filenames. Should work with international filenames (I dunno) as well as any OS path type (with the exceptions noted below).