I am having a really simple problem with regular expressions and Rails. I need to validate that input is a number or only digits. I using this:
validates_format_of :po_box, :with => /\d*/, :message => "PO Box must be a number only. Remove all text."
however, rails is letting anything be entered. i am getting other regular expressions like /a/ to work but for some reason not \d* or \d or [0-9]* or [0-9].
Can anyone help? thanks, Wes
Okay I found a validation method that works for this: validates_numericality_of ....to answer my own question. However, i still don't understand why my approach above still doesn't work???
Wes
/^[+\-]?\d+$/ is the expression to check if the format is an integer........
Wes
You already answered your question, but for the record, /\d*/ matches
zero or more occurrences of numeric digits, so entering anything
meets the zero criterion. You can use \d+ which requires at least one
digit, but more likely, you want /^\d+$/ which requires everything to
be digits and requires an entry.
HTH
/^[0-9]+$/ would work as well.
-john
No problem, we've said the same thing. 
--j