Laravel validation regex, breaks in view

Question

So, I have the following rules in my model:

public static $rules = array(
    'name'            => 'required|alpha_dash|unique:subsidiaries',
    'internal_number' => 'required|alpha_dash|unique:subsidiaries',
    'expedition_rate' => array('required', 'regex:/^[0-9]{1,3}(\.?)[0-9]{1,2}$/'),
    'hundred_kg_rate' => array('regex:/^[0-9]{1,5}(\.?)[0-9]{1,2}$/'),
    'handling'        => array('regex:/^[0-9]{1,3}(\.?)[0-9]{1,2}$/'),
    'insurance'       => 'required|numeric',
);

But, for some reason, when the regex is applied in the pattern attribute tag in html... it breaks!

Result:

<input required="true" pattern="^[0-9]{" class="form-control" ....>
                               _________
                                 \
                                  => This right here should be
                               ^[0-9]{1,3}(\.?)[0-9]{1,2}$

Solution

Try using like this.

array(
    'field' => 'regex:[a-z]'
);

Hope this would helpful.

Comments

[Alex]

How can one, escape curly braces in a regex syntax? This is new for me

[Thomas Kelley]

Double all of the backslashes.

[Thomas Kelley]

Sorry, I think I misunderstood your question. To escape the curly brace, you should just be able to do \{...\}. When it renders, it shouldn't have that backslash.

[Alex]

I have tried it, with no positive effect. But the problem I don't think it's the backslash, since if I do {1\\,3} I'll eventually get a "^[0-9]{1" and no more

[Thomas Kelley]

That's weird. You may want to ask this question over at Laravel's GitHub... It might very well be a bug. I looked at their validation test cases, and none of them include curly braces: github.com/laravel/framework/blob/…

[Alex]

Well, somebody replied my question in Laravel's forums... and it seems that it might be a bug: forums.laravel.io/viewtopic.php?pid=56239#p56239

[Thomas Kelley]

Interesting. In your case, rather than write a custom validator, you could instead just rewrite your RegEx to not include that comma. For example, x{1,3} can also be represented as xx?x?. At any rate, good luck with your project!