[thelist] Multi-lingual form field checking

Diane Soini dianesoini at earthlink.net
Tue Jan 6 19:32:16 CST 2004


I've got a javascript that uses regular expressions to check the syntax 
of a form field. To check for the presence of a word, it is looking for 
[a-z0-9] characters. That's probably not enough characters even for 
English, but now that at least I'm pretty sure that the regexp works, 
I'm looking now to expand it to work for non-English languages. It 
looks like I will have to apply this to the following languages:

French, German, Dutch, Portugese, Italian, and Spanish.

What characters should I test for? Should I just change it to consider 
any non-space character to characterize a word? That's probably the 
best thing to do for English, but will Javascript blow up if it 
encounters non-English letters with accents and things no matter what 
I'm testing for? Will browsers like IE drop in the "wrong" characters 
like it tends to do when it inserts "smart" quotes into form fields?

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Diane



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