RegExp \A \z doesnt work, but thats what Rails 4 requires
javascript, parsley.js, regex, ruby-on-rails, ruby-on-rails-4
Solution
JavaScript does not support `\A` or `\z` in its `RegExp`.
Here's some raw data, first for JavaScript:
var a = "hello\nworld"
(/^world/).test(a) // false
(/^world/m).test(a) // true
(/hello$/).test(a) // false
(/hello$/m).test(a) // true
Next, for ruby:
a = "hello\nworld"
a.match(/^world/) # => #<MatchData "world">
a.match(/\Aworld/) # => nil
a.match(/hello$/) # => #<MatchData "hello">
a.match(/hello\z/) # => nil
From this, we see that ruby's `\A` and `\z` are equivalent to JavaScript's `^` and `$` as long as you don't use the multiline `m` modifier. If you are concerned about the input having multiple lines, you're simply going to have to translate your regular expressions between these two languages with respect to these matching characters.
Problem
I recently switched to Rails 4 and the security requirements no longer seem to allow the use of regular expressions in the style of /^..$/. The error states that regular expressions should instead be written in the style of /\A..\z/. Making this change seems to resolve all of my server side validation issues, but unfortunately it also broke all of my client side validation in javascript. A simple example. I want to validate a username to be letters, number, or periods. The old regex looked like /^[0-9a-zA-Z.]+$/ and worked both server side (Rails 3.x) and client side ``` new RegExp( /^[0-9a-zA-Z.]+$/ ).test('myuser.name') = true ``` The new regex looks like /\A[0-9a-zA-Z.]+\z/ and works server side but fails client side ``` new RegExp( /\A[0-9a-zA-Z.]+\z/ ).test('myser.name') = false ``` So I'm clearly doing something wrong, but I can't seem to find any explanations. I checked that \A..\z are valid regex to make sure that its not some Rails-specific hack and it seems to be legit. Any ideas?