Hiya all,

I asked this last week but I never gave a proper real live example of my csv.....Sorry ..My Fault

Here goes...I need a regular expression to validate a csv for the below file example.

0067,Medium,7NOK6XX45,,,CHEMDRY SECTION,5 The River,Riverside Lock,Kilcullen,Co Kildare,028BS007REIL3000,Donn,McGull,045481400

0067,Medium,7NOK62245,,,WALLACE SECTION,5 The Ware,Moore Side,Drumgan,Co Clare,028BS007REIL9000,Donn,McGull,045481422

Validation Needed is

Total Number of fields must be 14

Field Lengths can not exceed Spec (Below)

Field3 and Field 11 must be CAPS

Field1 and field3 and field6 and field7 and field11 can not be empty.

Field length Chart:

FieldNumber MaxLength
Field1               9
Field2               10
Field3               15
Field4               19
Field5               10
Field6               36
Field7               36
Field8               36
Field9               36
Field10             36
Field11             16
Field12             36
Field13             36
Field14             16

Can someone please help...

Ray..

First, take a look at the FileIO.TextFieldParser class.  It was designed for reading in text files in fixed-length or delimited format.

If you decide to stick with a regex implementation, you can do something like the following:

\d{1,9},\w{0,10}, etc

Basically, you first look at each field and decide what characters are valid in it.  Then you put {minimum,maximum} after this to specify the allowed size of the field.  Then you put a comma.  Repeat until the end.

Common character-based questions are:

1) Can the field hold numbers?

2) Can the field hold characters?

3) Can the field hold quotation marks, possibly enclosing commas?

Etc.

Or, you can use the TextFieldParser class and a simple for loop to evaluate the populate fields.  Up to you.