Validate serial number

I am trying to validate a serial number. The serial must be 7 characters: three numbers, followed by two letters, followed by two numbers (Example: 123AB67)
I am able to inter invalid serial such as:999A9A9, 9999AA9, and 999AAA9.

$serial = uc($serial);
    if (length($serial) > 7
        or substr($serial, 0, 3) !~ m/[0-9]/
        or substr($serial, 3, 2) !~ m/[A-Z]/
        or substr($serial, 5, 2) !~ m/[0-9]/) {
                  # tell user serial is not valid }
    else    {# acknowledge input}

I appreciate someone looking at my code.

thanks,
NevadaSam

one regex is all you should need, the pattern would be

[0-9]{3}[A-Z]{2}[0-9]{2}


(this should be PHP forum though

Here's a function you can use to check if it's valid or not:

PHP Code:

<?php
function validate_serial($serial)
{
  $valid = false;
  $pattern = '/^[0-9]{3}[A-Z]{2}[0-9]{2}$/';
  $serial = strtoupper($serial);
  
  if(strlen($serial) == 7)
    $valid = (preg_match($pattern, $serial)) ? true : false;

  return $valid;
}
?>

This function returns true or false, depending on whether the serial is valid or not. To use it you would do:

PHP Code:

if(validate_serial($s1))
  echo 'valid serial';
else
  echo 'invalid serial'; 


Where $s1 is the serial you want to check.

Cheers,


MC

Originally Posted by chrishirst

(this should be PHP forum though)

Thanks for responding to my post. I am doing this in Perl which is what I am learning now. If you wish for me to put my future questions abot Perl in the PHP forum, let me know.

Problem Solved!
Thanks,
Samantha

Aha!

No Perl is fine here, just please mention what language you are using.

Unfortunately I treat Perl a bit like Latin, A long dead language only used by scholars and academics

I was thinking that I should mention "Perl" since this forum in only titled "Coding Forum". I will from now own.

I am hearing that Perl is a dieing langauage, but I have to learn a little about it. I just bought a "PHP & MySQL" book so I will be in the other forum also real soon.

OK well for PERL (slowly forgetting this language) the subroutine would be

sub validate_serial {
  my ($serial) = @_;
  my $valid = false;
  if(length($serial) eq 7) {
    if($serial =~ /^[0-9]{3}[A-Z]{2}[0-9]{2}$/)
    {
      $valid = true;
    }
  }
return $valid;
}

Cheers,


MC