search for: nanything

Let''s say you want to validate that an attribute contains only 2-10 lowercase characters, e.g. with validates_format_of. The appropriate regex is obviously /^[a-z]{2,10}$/, right? Wrong! Try it with "abc\nANYTHING YOU LIKE" - this is perfectly valid. On the second look the reason is clear: ^ matches the start of a line, $ matches the end of a line. So as long as one line in the input matches, the string is accepted, although it could contain absolute rubbish. Chances are good that this will never ha...