How can I restrict the input of the registration number column to a specific format of AB-78. The first 2 characters must be alphabets and the last two numbers. I tried like [A-Z][A-Z]-[0-9][0-9] but it didn't work in SQLite.
Use the GLOB operator. It supports a limited set of matching patterns. You could add a CHECK constraint in the column definition (e.g. as part of the CREATE TABLE statement) that includes a GLOB expression, similar to
CHECK (column GLOB '[A-Za-z][A-Za-z]-[0-9][0-9]')
GLOB patterns are case sensitive, so I included both ranges of uppercase and lowercase characters. If you need a particular case, then just remove the other range in the character class.
See online docs for more information about LIKE, REGEXP and GLOB. Information on GLOB patterns can be found here or doing a web search. There are many pages with more information. I don't think the built-in GLOB function supports all named character classes.
Related
In SQLite you can use named parameters in statements, like this (Python example):
cur.execute("insert into lang values (:foo, :bar)", {'foo': 'a', 'bar': 2})
Is there any way to have parameter names containing spaces? I.e:
cur.execute("insert into lang values (:'foo bar')", {'foo bar': 'a'})
The documentation suggests not but you never know.
Apparently for the #AAA form you can:
The identifier name in this case can include one or more occurrences of "::" and a suffix enclosed in "(...)" containing any text at all.
But that doesn't let you have an arbitrary name since the brackets are still part of the name. So the answer appears to be no.
How performant is the SQLite3 REGEXP operator?
For simplicity, assume a simple table with a single column pattern and an index
CREATE TABLE `foobar` (`pattern` TEXT);
CREATE UNIQUE INDEX `foobar_index` ON `foobar`(`pattern`);
and a query like
SELECT * FROM `foobar` WHERE `pattern` REGEXP 'foo.*'
I have been trying to compare and understand the output from EXPLAIN and it seems to be similar to using LIKE except it will be using regexp for matching. However, I am not fully sure how to read the output from EXPLAIN and I'm not getting a grasp of how performant it will be.
I understand it will be slow compared to a indexed WHERE `pattern` = 'foo' query but is it slower/similar to LIKE?
sqlite does not optimize WHERE ... REGEXP ... to use indexes. x REGEXP y is simply a function call; it's equivalent to regexp(x,y). Also note that not all installations of sqlite have a regexp function defined so using it (or the REGEXP operator) is not very portable. LIKE/GLOB on the other hand can take advantage of indexes for prefix queries provided that some additional conditions are met:
The right-hand side of the LIKE or GLOB must be either a string literal or a parameter bound to a string literal that does not begin with a wildcard character.
It must not be possible to make the LIKE or GLOB operator true by having a numeric value (instead of a string or blob) on the left-hand side. This means that either:
the left-hand side of the LIKE or GLOB operator is the name of an indexed column with TEXT affinity, or
the right-hand side pattern argument does not begin with a minus sign ("-") or a digit.
This constraint arises from the fact that numbers do not sort in lexicographical order. For example: 9<10 but '9'>'10'.
The built-in functions used to implement LIKE and GLOB must not have been overloaded using the sqlite3_create_function() API.
For the GLOB operator, the column must be indexed using the built-in BINARY collating sequence.
For the LIKE operator, if case_sensitive_like mode is enabled then the column must indexed using BINARY collating sequence, or if case_sensitive_like mode is disabled then the column must indexed using built-in NOCASE collating sequence.
If the ESCAPE option is used, the ESCAPE character must be ASCII, or a single-byte character in UTF-8.
I am trying to use a regular expression for name field in the asp.net application.
Conditions:name should be minimum 6 characters ?
I tried the following
"^(?=.*\d).{6}$"
I m completely new to the regex.Can any one suggest me what must be the regex for such condition ?
You could use this to match any alphanumeric character in length of 6 or more: ^[a-zA-Z0-9]{6,}$. You can tweak it to allow other characters or go the other route and just put in exclusions. The Regex Coach is a great environment for testing/playing with regular expressions (I wrote a blog post with some links to other tools too).
Look at Expression library and choose user name and/or password regex for you. You can also test your regex in online regex testers like RegexPlanet.
My regex suggestions are:
^[a-zA-Z][a-zA-Z0-9._\-]{5,}$
This regex accepts user names with minimum 6 characters, starting with a letter and containing only letters, numbers and ".","-","_" characters.
Next one:
^[a-zA-Z0-9._\\-]{6,}$
Similar to above, but accepts ".", "-", "_" and 0-9 to be first characters too.
If you want to validate only string length (minimum 6 characters), this simple regex below will be enough:
^.{6,}$
What about
^.{6,}$
What's all the stuff at the start of yours, and did you want to limit yourself to digits?
NRegex is a nice site for testing out regexes.
To just match 6 characters, ".{6}" is enough
In its simplest form, you can use the following:
.{6,}
This will match on 6 or more characters and fail on anything less. This will accept ANY character - unicode, ascii, whatever you are running through. If you have more requirements (i.e. only the latin alphabet, must contain a number, etc), the regex would obviously have to change.
Using ASP.NET syntax for the RegularExpressionValidator control, how do you specify restriction of two consecutive characters, say character 'x'?
You can provide a regex like the following:
(\\w)\\1+
(\\w) will match any word character, and \\1+ will match whatever character was matched with (\\w).
I do not have access to asp.net at the moment, but take this console app as an example:
Console.WriteLine(regex.IsMatch("hello") ? "Not valid" : "Valid"); // Hello contains to consecutive l:s, hence not valid
Console.WriteLine(regex.IsMatch("Bar") ? "Not valid" : "Valid"); // Bar does not contain any consecutive characters, so it's valid
Alexn is right, this is the way you match consecutive characters with a regex, i.e. (a)\1 matches aa.
However, I think this is a case of everything looking like a nail when you're holding a hammer. I would not use regex to validate this input. Rather, I suggest validating this in code (just looping through the string, comparing str[i] and str[i-1], checking for this condition).
This should work:
^((?<char>\w)(?!\k<char>))*$
It matches abc, but not abbc.
The key is to use so called "zero-width negative lookahead assertion" (syntax: (?! subexpression)).
Here we make sure that a group matched with (?<char>\w) is not followed by itself (expressed with (?!\k<char>)).
Note that \w can be replaced with any valid set of characters (\w does not match white-spaces characters).
You can also do it without named group (note that the referenced group has number 2):
^((\w)(?!\2))*$
And its important to start with ^ and end with $ to match the whole text.
If you want to only exclude text with consecutive x characters, you may use this
^((?<char>x)(?!\k<char>)|[^x\W])*$
or without backreferences
^(x(?!x)|[^x\W])*$
All syntax elements for .NET Framework Regular Expressions are explained here.
You can use a regex to validate what's wrong as well as what's right of course. The regex (.)\1 will match any two consecutive characters, so you can just reject any input that gives an IsValid result to that. If this is the only validation you need, I think this way is far easier than trying to come up with a regex to validate correct input instead.
I would like to know if it is possible to use [] in SQLite query as we used to in Access and other DB.
e.g. SELECT * FROM mytable WHERE fwords like '%b[e,i,a]d%'
this will retrieve all rows have fwords containing bad, bed, bid
Thanks a lot
From http://www.sqlite.org/lang_expr.html:
The LIKE operator does a pattern matching comparison. The operand to the right of the LIKE operator contains the pattern and the left hand operand contains the string to match against the pattern. A percent symbol ("%") in the LIKE pattern matches any sequence of zero or more characters in the string. An underscore ("_") in the LIKE pattern matches any single character in the string. Any other character matches itself or its lower/upper case equivalent (i.e. case-insensitive matching).
Does that help?
You can have a look at the regex section here.