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Re: Disallow spaces and special characters in a field

Hilary Stoupa — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 15:00:31 GMT

Wow, perfect - thanks for contributing to the thread with this pattern!

Re: Disallow spaces and special characters in a field

SharePointEric — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 11:42:28 GMT

I know that this is an old thread but thought it might be worth pointing out that you can use both Clayton's and Hilary's methods together. I wanted to allow my users to enter free, human-readable text in a field that gets used in the filename for browser-enabled forms in SharePoint. Spaces inflate the filename and special characters can interrupt the URL when you send links to the form by e-mail alerts so I needed a way to consume the user's entry and store it in a field with no spaces or special characters outside of hyphens, underscores and decimals that gets concatenated to a time stamp to form a filename. The answer was simple; the hidden field has a default value of: translate(../my:FieldName, "~!@#$%^&*()+=;'<>?,{}[]|\ ", "")

Re: Disallow spaces and special characters in a field

sudlev — Wed, 18 Jul 2012 01:59:33 GMT

Hi Hilary,

I'd like to echo these sentiment. Very helpful to people like myself who have no idea how to use these custom patterns (and much more useful than the included patterns).

So thanks a lot for posting this information.

Danny

Re: Disallow spaces and special characters in a field

Hilary Stoupa — Tue, 05 Jun 2012 15:02:42 GMT

The easiest approach there may just be to change the data type - set it to whole number (or decimal, if that's what you need). I'm not sure you'd need a custom pattern for this? Unless your "numbers" can start with zero, or include spaces, etc?

Re: Disallow spaces and special characters in a field

maro123 — Tue, 05 Jun 2012 11:40:20 GMT

Can you tell me how to make the text field to allow users to write only numbers?

Re: Disallow spaces and special characters in a field

Hilary Stoupa — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 15:33:39 GMT

Alex - you just made my day! Thanks!

Jack - sorry I didn't see your post earlier. I'm attaching an updated sample that allows white space (the escape for that is /s).

Re: Disallow spaces and special characters in a field

Alex Morales — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 15:19:58 GMT

Hilary,

I like so much your answers and this is not the first time you help me with.

Thank you so much, I have to create an user just to said thank you.

Alex Morales

Re: Disallow spaces and special characters in a field

JackBB — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 15:07:39 GMT

I'm using the pattern [A-Za-z0-9\-]* to allow only these characters, however I would like to allow the use of blank spaces also, I've been trying but can't seem to find the right pattern to also allow spaces in this field.

I would like to allow values like :

blabla bla23

blabla 123blabla bla 12

Thanks in advance

Jack

Re: Disallow spaces and special characters in a field

Gaston — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 19:04:38 GMT

Hi ravimca, I have the same problem, Did you solve that? Thanks.

Re: Disallow spaces and special characters in a field

ravimca — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 01:17:45 GMT

Can any one help me to validate special characters?

I want to validate texbox which allows numbers, letters and dashes and should not allow any special characters :"#%&*:<>?\/{|}~ and white space, actually I want to add some other special characters to this [^~`@#$ %\*]*

Thanks in advance

Ravi

Re: Disallow spaces and special characters in a field

warrtalon — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 14:48:31 GMT

Works great for me, too. I had no idea you could do syntax like that for a custom pattern. Thanks for the lesson, Hilary.

Re: Disallow spaces and special characters in a field

vivasuzi — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 14:38:06 GMT

Thanks I tried the second one out and it works great :)

Re: Disallow spaces and special characters in a field

vivasuzi — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 23:57:23 GMT

Thanks so much. Sounds like what I was looking for. I will try it at work tomorrow. FYI we have 2007.

Thanks!!

Re: Disallow spaces and special characters in a field

Hilary Stoupa — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 21:06:05 GMT

Well, Clayton makes a good point. Much better to just set the expression for the characters to ALLOW, since there are only 3. Here's another copy, this time I saved as 2003 compat.

Re: Disallow spaces and special characters in a field

Hilary Stoupa — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 20:58:20 GMT

You should probably use data validation and use a regular expression to give a validation error if they include characters you won't accept. I've attached a simple sample xsn to this post that might help you. You can right click and select save as to save locally, then right click the file and open in design mode to preview. Let me know if you are still using IP 2003 -- I can post IP 2003 compatible.