Detect Characters in String

Hello All

I am currently developing an online email scanning system, but have come across a problem which I was wondering whether someone could help me with.

Basically the site asks a user to copy and paste email headers in to a textarea. This works fine as it is 90% of the time. However, on some ocassions I get error messages (500 Internal server error). The reason for this appears to be the fact that if the header you have pasted in contains ";" halfway across a line, it raises the error.

Unfortunately I cannot get the page the info is submitted to, to detect and repair the problem before the error is raised, as I get the internal error 500 etc. The solution as it stands would appear to be that I have to put in a javascript check on the entry page to ensure it inserts a new line after every ";" in the textarea.

I would really appreciate it if someone could tell me how this is done. I have tried all sorts (Replace etc.) and it still doesn't want to work.

This is the code as it stands at the moment:

Code:

---

function checkform(){ 
if(document.forms.Form1.header && document.forms.Form1.header.value =='') 
{   
  alert('You have not entered an email header. Please try again.');
  return false;
}
else {
  var str = document.forms.Form1.header.value;
  str.replace(/;/, '');
  return true;
}
}

---

If you want to check the site as it stands, the address at the moment is www.detect.thehortonfamily.co.uk

Anyone's help would be greatly appreciated.

Best Regards


Tom

You are doing this sort of right:

Code:

---

  var str = document.forms.Form1.header.value;
  str.replace(/;/, '');

---

It should probably be:

Code:

---

  str.replace(/;/gm, '');

---

The gm simply means to replace this globally on every line. Very old browsers will barf on the m (multi-line) part though. So, if it is only all one long line, just use g.

However, even with that enhancement, simply declaring:

Code:

---

  str.replace(/;/gm, '');

---

doesn't really do anything. It does strip ; from str, but it doesn't change str, and it doesn't set anything to the stripped value of str.

So you might want to do:

Code:

---

function checkform(){ 
if(document.forms.Form1.header && document.forms.Form1.header.value =='') 
{   
  alert('You have not entered an email header. Please try again.');
  return false;
}
else {
  var str = document.forms.Form1.header.value;
  document.forms.Form1.header.value = str.replace(/;/gm, '');
  return true;
}
}

---

This will be effective, as long as it executes before ; can cause an error.