This is not one of these "help me build my regex" questions. I have an HTML form input field where a user can provide geographical position data in various formats. The following regex works fine in regexr.com as well as in my application. However, I want to use the "pattern" parameter of HTML5 to additionally validate a user's input before submitting it.
((([E|W|N|S](\s)?)?([\-]?[0-1]?[(0-9)]{1,2})[°][ ]?([(0-5)]?[(0-9)]{1})([\.|,][0-9]{1,5})?['][ ]?([0-5]{0,1}[0-9]?(([\.|\,])[0-9]{0,3})?)([\"]|[']{2}){0,1}((\s)?[E|W|N|S])?)|([-]?[1]?[0-9]{1,2}[\.|,][0-9]{1,9}))
The point is that this regex contains a quote character ("). Now, I put this regex in my input like this:
<input type="text" pattern = "regex..."...." />
Browsers do not recognize this regex and don't do any validation at all, so obviously I need to escape that quote. What I tried so far:
- PHP's addslashes() function escapes too many characters.
- I escaped the quote with a single backslash
That did not change anything. I tested with Chrome, which works fine with simple regular expressions. The one above obviously is a bit too complicated.
I know the regular expression above is not perfect for matching coordinates, however, this is not to be discussed here. I just would like to know how to correctly escape a pattern in HTML5 as Chrome does not do anything with that regex.
