Regex in input Pattern is not valid, but the expression is functional

Question

Regex in input Pattern is not valid, but the expression is functional

Asked 4 years, 5 months ago

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I have a field on a form that can only accept Youtube or Vimeo Urls. Having this, I found the following regex:

(?:(?i)(?:https:|http:)?\/\/)?(?:(?i)(?:www\.youtube\.com\/(?:embed\/|watch\?v=)|youtu\.be\/|youtube\.googleapis\.com\/v\/)(?<YoutubeID>[a-z0-9-_]{11,12})|(?:vimeo\.com\/|player\.vimeo\.com\/video\/)(?<VimeoID>[0-9]+))

Tested here: https://regex101.com/r/PVdjg0/2

However, when adding this REGEX to the input via attribute pattern, it is accepting any URL.

<html>
    <head>
        <meta charset="utf-8">
    </head>
    <body>
        <form>
            <input type='url' required pattern='(?:(?i)(?:https:|http:)?\/\/)?(?:(?i)(?:www\.youtube\.com\/(?:embed\/|watch\?v=)|youtu\.be\/|youtube\.googleapis\.com\/v\/)(?<YoutubeID>[a-z0-9-_]{11,12})|(?:vimeo\.com\/|player\.vimeo\.com\/video\/)(?<VimeoID>[0-9]+))' title='URL Vimeo/Youtube.' name='video' placeholder='Video URL' />
            <input type='submit'>
        </form>
    </body>
</html>

What is going on? What was done incorrectly?

1 answer

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by hkotsubo • **55,826** points · Answer 1 · 2020-06-15T19:11:36+00:00

The problem with regular expressions is that they don’t work exactly the same in all languages/Engines/API’s, and a feature that exists in one will not necessarily be supported in another.

In the case of Javascript, it does not support inline flags, like the (?i) (which serves to render the expression case insensitive, that is, do not differentiate between upper and lower case letters). And the documentation says that the expression must be a valid regex in Javascript, and when the expression is invalid, the attribute pattern is ignored.

Even in regex101.com, in the menu on the left there is the option FLAVOR for you to choose the engine regex. And if you choose "Ecmascript (Javascript)", you will see that the actual expression is invalid, because of the (?i).

If you remove this flag, the expression works. But it ceases to be case insensitive, then you won’t accept things like "WWW.youTubE.Com", for example:

<form>
  <input id="campo" type="text" pattern="(?:(?:https?:)?\/\/)?(?:(?:www\.youtube\.com\/(?:embed\/|watch\?v=)|youtu\.be\/|youtube\.googleapis\.com\/v\/)(?<YoutubeID>[a-z0-9-_]{11,12})|(?:vimeo\.com\/|player\.vimeo\.com\/video\/)(?<VimeoID>[0-9]+))" required />
  <input type="submit" value="ok">
</form>

I changed the excerpt (?:https:|http:) for (?:https?:) (the s? indicates that the letter "s" is optional).

If you want to validate case insensitive, The way is to do outside the input:

let regex = /^((?:(?:https?:)?\/\/)?(?:(?:www\.youtube\.com\/(?:embed\/|watch\?v=)|youtu\.be\/|youtube\.googleapis\.com\/v\/)(?<YoutubeID>[a-z0-9-_]{11,12})|(?:vimeo\.com\/|player\.vimeo\.com\/video\/)(?<VimeoID>[0-9]+)))$/i;
document.querySelector('#form').addEventListener('submit', function(event) {
    let url = document.querySelector('#campo').value;
    if (regex.test(url)) return true;

    alert('URL inválida');
    event.preventDefault();
    return false;
});

<form id="form">
  <input id="campo" type="text" required />
  <input type="submit" value="ok">
</form>

Note that I created regex using /etc.../i - the "i" at the end indicates that she is case insensitive. And I also included the markers ^ and $, indicating the start and end of the string, to ensure that the field only has what is specified by regex (in the attribute pattern it is not necessary, therefore for default he already considers that the field can only have what is in the regex).

Unfortunately there is no practical way to do it on your own pattern of input. A "solution" (which is so horrible, I consider a horrendous gambiarra, don’t use), would be instead of youtube, place [Yy][Oo][Uu][Tt][uU][Bb][Ee] (and do it for all the letters you want case insensitive). But it is - in my opinion - too bad, I prefer the second solution suggested above, doing the validation in Javascript itself, outside the pattern.

But if you want only the video ID is case insensitive, just change to (?<YoutubeID>[a-zA-Z0-9-_]{11,12}) - adding A-Z, she also considers capital letters.