Applying a Regex to a Rich text Box in Umbraco 7

Question

I'm trying to apply a very simple regex to a Rich Text Box in Umbraco 7.

The regex I'm trying to apply is [^£\$].

I've tried some simple ones, [a-zA-Z], etc, but nothing seems to take effect.

Switching the property to as textString, and the regexes work immediately.

What am I doing wrong?

Thanks, john

Regular expressions work on the text, not objects. Perhaps, that is why. — Wiktor Stribiżew, Mar 18 '16 at 10:27
That's the conclusion I've come to, but why would the RegEx box be available on it, if I can't use it on it? — John Mc, Mar 18 '16 at 11:02
I bet it is because the developers thought it was "not worth effort" to gray the field out. — Wiktor Stribiżew, Mar 18 '16 at 11:04
If you really need to validate the RTE's value using a regex, you could create your own property editor and apply the validation logic there. — elolos, Mar 19 '16 at 13:06

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 18 '16 at 12:00

The point is that the rich text editor in Umbraco has various settings and it can show different types of content.

Regular expressions are used to find matches inside text data only.

Thus, setting the content type to textString for regex-based search to work is logical.

The fact that the regex box is not grayed out when a non-supporting mode is selected is most probably a minor bug.

1 Answers1