Problem with Regex statement

I want to validate (in the code behind, in the aspx.cs file) a date statement that goes by this format:

- Thursday, October 1rst, 2009 - 3:21 pm

I tried a few different ways, but nothing returns valid (with what I've tried), this is a basic example of what I've tried:

Edit: There was a problem that I notticed with the copy and pasting that I did when I pasted the code, so I fixed that error

var

dttxt= ((TextBox)CreateUserWizardStep1.ContentTemplateCon tainer.FindControl("DateTextBox"));


if (System.Text.RegularExpressions.Regex.IsMatch(dttx t.Text, @"^[0-9a-zA-Z-:,\s]{1,50}$")

{



}



If anyone has any suggestions, it would be greatly appreciated.

re: Problem with Regex statement

I freely admit that I'm absolutely horrible at regular expressions... which is why I cheat! I found this really helpful online tool, hopefully it helps you out :)

http://www.gskinner.com/RegExr/

Maybe that will let you debug your regular expression and figure out why it's not working as expected. A big hint: You can hover your mouse over the various parts of the expression and the tool tells you what they are supposed to do.

Good luck!

re: Problem with Regex statement

Thnaks for showing me to that page, but, all that showed me was that my regex is correct in theory.

re: Problem with Regex statement

You could try using the DateTime.TryParse(string) method.
If your string can be cast into a date, then hurray.
If not...

re: Problem with Regex statement

I'll try the datetime.tryparse method.

Also, I even went to another regex test site, http://www.regular-expressions.info/, and I was able to test it against my string, and it returned as valid. So, it must be some kind of an error in the c# parsing. Has anyone else ever seen or heard of anything like this?

re: Problem with Regex statement

Do I interpret this RegEx right?
Does your text consist of any combination of
Letters (a-z A-Z)
Numbers (0-9)
comma (,)
Colon (:)
Hyphen (-)
Whitespace (\s)
for a length of anywhere between 1-50.

I don't see how that is going to validate your date/time string.
"I swallowed 6 goldfish" would match that criteria.

re: Problem with Regex statement

Is it possible that this
Isn't finding the named control "DateTextBox" and thus later the line
t.text has nothing to work with? So you are comparing against null?

re: Problem with Regex statement

It is.

Ayways, thanks for all the help, but, actually I figured out another way to do what I was intending to do, it was with datetime methods instead.