Validating file types by regular expression

Question

I have a .NET webform that has a file upload control that is tied to a regular expression validator. This validator needs to validate that only certain filetypes should be allowed for upload (jpg,gif,doc,pdf)

The current regular expression that does this is:

^(([a-zA-Z]:)|(\\{2}\w+)\$?)(\\(\w[\w].*))(.jpg|.JPG|.gif|.GIF|.doc|.DOC|.pdf|.PDF)$

However this does not seem to be working...Can anyone give me a little reg ex help?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Your regex seems a bit too complex in my opinion. Also, remember that the dot is a special character meaning "any character". The following regex should work (note the escaped dots):

^.*\.(jpg|JPG|gif|GIF|doc|DOC|pdf|PDF)$

You can use a tool like Expresso to test your regular expressions.

Answer 2

Are you just looking to verify that the file is of a given extension? You can simplify what you are trying to do with something like this:

(.*?)\.(jpg|gif|doc|pdf)$

Then, when you call IsMatch() make sure to pass RegexOptions.IgnoreCase as your second parameter. There is no reason to have to list out the variations for casing.

Edit: As Dario mentions, this is not going to work for the RegularExpressionValidator, as it does not support casing options.

Answer 3

Your regexp seems to validate both the file name and the extension. Is that what you need? I'll assume it's just the extension and would use a regexp like this:

\.(jpg|gif|doc|pdf)$

And set the matching to be case insensitive.

Answer 4

You can embed case insensitity into the regular expression like so:

\.(?i:)(?:jpg|gif|doc|pdf)$

Answer 5

(.*?).(jpg|gif|doc|pdf)$ this expression works fine and show an error message works fine in IE but doesn't effect on FireFox why tell me

Answer 6

Because vbscript supports only freakin IE