RegEx - Regular Expresions

I have been playing with RegEx in Java more and more, and it is fun working out how they work and even built some myself.

I needed RegEx to perform checks on strings to validate password and email strings.

Finding RegEx to check if a string has either capitals, lowercase or numbers was quite easy :-

Capital = ".*[A-Z].*";
Lowercase = ".*[a-z].*";
Number = ".*[0-9].*";

Finding Email validation RegEx was a bit harder as there are many different compositions, some being quite loose and others being way to precise.

After a lot of testing I settled on this one :-

Email = "\\b(?!,|/)(\\w+)(?!,|/)((-?\\w+)*)?(?!,|/)(\\.{1})?(\\w*)?@{1}(\\w*)(?!,|/)((-?)(\\w*)?)(?!,|/)(\\.{1}\\w+){1,2}\\b";

But finding a RegEx to find a symbol in a string was a bit harder still.

I read many many forums and tutorials and tried many many different compositions.

I even built an array of every RegEx I had built for each individual symbol using a break before each symbol to ensure no meta characters slipped by :-

@ Symbol = ".*[\\@].*"

Then I looped through he array and tested against my test stings.

Sure it worked, but what a lot of code for something that I though should have been quite straight forward.

Then after far too many hours I looked at this problem from a different angle, if I could not reliably test a string for a symbol why not test a string for a character that was not a capital, lowercase, whitespace, underscore or number.

So I built the following :-

 Regex = ".*[^A-Za-z0-9!@#$%^&*()_+=-{}~`].*";

In RegEx ^ = not, similar to Java ! = not.

This works but once again I am still defining each symbol.

So I kept working and testing until I built :-

BetterRegex = ".*[^A-Za-z0-9\s].*";

It took me far to long but wow I had some fun.

Now it is time to relax ... relax and eat chocolate.

Cabbage

Cabbage

Cabbage

Cabbage

RegEx - Regular Expresions

RegEx, (Regular Expresions), are truncated code strings that can be used to search other strings for patterns of characters.

RegEx are a lot of fun to play with.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression

A great resource site that can help teach, test and share RegEx strings.

http://gskinner.com/RegExr/

Digital Rights Management (DRM) - good or bad for games and gamers

Digital Rights Management (DRM) 

A great read on the topic of DRM and how it affects the games industry.

For years publisher have used locking codes, digital codebooks, encrypted discs, and software rootkits in attempts to thwart game piracy.

But the only people really affected were the legitimate consumers.
The simplicity of access and lower price points actually makes it more likely that a consumer will be willing to pay for a game, and therefore will actively discourage the illegal pirating of the game.

http://www.ausgamers.com/features/read/3323745