From: gabriele renzi <surrender_it@...>
Date: 2006-03-30T07:38:44+09:00
Subject: Re: %r regex matching is ignoring my leading zeros

Dara Sanderson ha scritto:
> Hello,
> 
> I hope someone can help me or at least confirm that I'm not going 
> insane.
> 
> I have a model in which I'm trying to validate information before it 
> saves.
> One particular field is for and expiration date.  The code in my model 
> to do the validation looks like this:
> 
>  validates_format_of :expiration,
>                      :with       => %r{^[\d]{4,4}$},
>                      :message    => "must be formatted (mmyy)"
> 
> 
> The problem is if someone enter a date that starts with a zero like 
> "0309"  The validation somehow just doesn't "see" the leading zero and 
> keeps returning an error as though the user isn't submitting it 
> properly.  I did verify that the controller is definetly sending all 
> four digits in the post.

I think I'd write the Regexp as:
%r{^\d{4}$}

Anyway, you one seem to work as expected on my box in irb:
irb(main):001:0> x=/^[\d]{4,4}$/
=> /^[\d]{4,4}$/
irb(main):002:0> x2=%r|^[\d]{4,4}$|
=> /^[\d]{4,4}$/
irb(main):003:0> x.match "0102"
=> #<MatchData:0x2c0b300>
irb(main):004:0> x2.match "0102"
=> #<MatchData:0x2c08fa8>

and in rails:
$cat app\models\foo.rb
class Foo < ActiveRecord::Base
  validates_format_of :bar, :with=>%r{^\d{4}$}
end

 >> f=Foo.new
=> #<Foo:0x39658e8 @new_record=true, @attributes={"bar"=>""}>
 >> f.bar ="0123"
=> "0123"
 >> f.save
=> true
 >> f.bar ="012"
=> "012"
 >> f.save
=> false

what version of ruby are you running?
Maybe it could have been some damn pesky problem like not having 
reloaded the model (this happened to me many times :) ?