Validating URL and Email Addresses with regexp in Lotus Notes

I needed to recreate this from scratch, and so I’m documenting this here for the next time.

Most of the credit should go to Julian Robichauxand his ls2j examples db, and in particultar the JakartaOroWrapper Library

My “invention” involves creating a isValidateURL and isValidateEmailAddress Regular Expression (or regexp ) routines that worked for me.

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Uselsx "*javacon"
Use "JakartaOroWrapper"

Function isValidateURL (Url As String) As Boolean

Dim jSession As New JavaSession
Dim oroClass As JavaClass
Dim oro As JavaObject
Dim vector As JavaObject
Dim jError As JavaError

'** get the ORO wrapper class and instantiate an instance of it
Set oroClass = jSession.GetClass("JakartaOroWrapper")
Set oro = oroClass.CreateObject

Dim pattern As String
' pattern = "^((http[s]?|ftp):\/)?\/?([^:\/\s]+)((\/\w+)*\/)([\w\-\.]+[^#?\s]+)(.*)?(#[\w\-]+)?$"
' pattern = "(http|ftp|https):\/\/[\w\-_]+(\.[\w\-_]+)+([\w\-\.,@?^=%&:/~\+#]*[\w\-\@?^=%&/~\+#])?"
pattern = "^(http|https|ftp)\://[a-zA-Z0-9\-\.]+\.[a-zA-Z]{2,3}(:[a-zA-Z0-9]*)?/?([a-zA-Z0-9\-\._\?\,\'/\\\+&%\$#\=~])*$"

isValidateURL = oro.matches(Url, pattern, False)
End Function

Function isValidateEmailAddress (emailAddress As String) As Boolean

Dim jSession As New JavaSession
Dim oroClass As JavaClass
Dim oro As JavaObject
Dim vector As JavaObject
Dim jError As JavaError

'** get the ORO wrapper class and instantiate an instance of it
Set oroClass = jSession.GetClass("JakartaOroWrapper")
Set oro = oroClass.CreateObject

'** here are the strings and patterns we'll play with
Dim testString As String
Dim pattern As String
'pattern = "\b[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}\b"
'RFC_2822 version
pattern = "[a-z0-9!#$%&'*+/=?^_`{|}~-]+(?:\.[a-z0-9!#$%&'*+/=?^_`{|}~-]+)*@(?:[a-z0-9](?:[a-z0-9-]*[a-z0-9])?\.)+[a-z0-9](?:[a-z0-9-]*[a-z0-9])?"

isValidateEmailAddress = oro.matches(emailAddress, pattern, False)

End Function

How I used it was not very exciting but for completeness.

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If Not NotesDoc.url(0) = "" Then
If Not isValidateURL ( NotesDoc.url(0)) Then
Msgbox "The URL Address ("+NotesDoc.url(0)+") doesn't look right, Please confirm it is correct.", 0 + 32, "Validation Error"
NotesUIDoc.GotoField("URL")
End If
End If

A big cautionary note about the regexp patterns I used. for both Url’s and emails addresses, I seen them very short and very very long. It’s easy to make assumtion about the validate TLD and other aspects of the strings, so test test test, and be aware.

And, of course, this is but a small piece of what you could do with regexp!!