It's 7:18am on Sunday morning. Wanna help me with a regular expression?

[dogknob]

I know this is a total long-shot, but if anybody here would like to help me test the monster I wrote last night, then you can do it here:

http://regexr.com/38psn

I've spent a while trying to break it with mistakes one might make while naming a file that requires a naming convention (e.g. typos)

I'm using it to rat out bad filenames before I queue them up for transcoding in ffmpeg. The files are screened for bad extensions and bad MIME-types before they hit the expression, which I can't post here because of smilies.

There's info about the naming convention and what is supposed to match/not match at the link.

Thanks!

[ChromeFoundry]

1. Not sure if it's critical

...I expanded the date parsing to match most valid dates....

http://regexr.com/38pt0

Note: it only checks for months between 01-12 and days between 01-31, last valid year is adjustable.

[dogknob]

2. Ooooo!

Thanks!

I was using php checkdate() strings that make it through my original regex -- so no stuff like February 30...

But that's lovely... if I decide to change this from a php cron job to a .sh cron job! Wheee!

[dogknob]

3. EDITED: might be done with this now.

http://regexr.com/38pua

I kept your improvements to the date group; nothing wacky will get in and it addresses my tendency to sometimes type '2104' .

checkdate() will kick out bogus dates.

I made what I think are some substantial improvements to the name and city groups. I also included a full description of what the regex is supposed to do (and not do) at the new link above.

Thanks so much for your help. This is the first time I've ever sat down and written a regex from scratch... and that website is the best one I have seen so far for testing.

[ChromeFoundry]

4. Here is an alternative RegEx tester

It offers color coding and explanations for your expressions.
Offers a fairly decent debugger for an online solution.

http://regex101.com/r/xE3gZ3

[dogknob]

5. Dude! the colors!

I'm seein' some serious shit right there!

Bookmarking.

[dogknob]

6. Got a bit more fat trimmed off of it.

Good looking out!

EDIT: oops! forgot to make city totally optional!
http://regex101.com/r/lN4cI2