Does anybody have a regular expression that would work to limit the number of words in a response? For instance, I'd like to use it with jQuery validate so I can restrict a textbox/textarea to have say 250 words. The boxes will be plain-text.
I've done some Googling but none of the ones I've found were very good. They mostly centered around doing \b\w+\b but I had trouble getting it work.
How about splitting the text with a regex (say "\s+") and then counting the length of the resulting list? That would be somewhat easier to read.
Could you try:
^(?:\b\w+\b[\s\r\n]*){1,250}$
That would limit to 250 words over multiple lines.
I am afraid that the Alan's initial proposition:
/^\w+(?:\s+\w+){0,249}$/
might be a case of catastrophic backtracking
When nesting repetition operators, make absolutely sure that there is only one way to match the same match
Hi, Vonc,
The regular expression which you gave: ^(?:\b\w+\b[\s\r\n]*){1,250}$ to limit 250 words over multiple lines works if it doesnt have any special characters... what should i do if i need to search for number of words which also consists special characters... Some thing like this an example: --> Hi! i need help with regular expression, please help me. <--