Regular expression to limit string length

Question

I have a problem when I need to use RegularExpressionValidator to limit the string length to 400 characters.

My expression was .{0,400}

My question is: is there a way to limit the length of characters to 400 without considering spaces?

I want to be able to accept spaces in a string, but not take it into length. Is it possible?

Answer 1

I really agree with Greg, but here you need a regular expression:

 ^\s*([^\s]\s*){0,400}$ 

@Boopid: If you really only meant the space character, replace \ s with a space in the regular expression.

Answer 2

It looks like you can write your own validation class instead of using the RegularExpressionValidator. Regular expressions certainly have their uses, but that doesn't look like one of them.

A custom validator can remove all spaces and then check the length of the string. Ultimately, the code will be more readable than a regular expression that does the same thing.