Detect Characters in String

[T Horton]

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:

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

[jscheuer1]

You are doing this sort of right:

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

It should probably be:

  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:

  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:

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.