Regular expression to validate date - C#

Question

I am using a calenderExtender control to get a date from user. The text box can be edit manually by the user. I am using a RegularExpressionValidator to validate Input date. The input format i need is

MMM dd, yyyy

Now i am using a regular expression shown below to validate date

  ((Jan)|(Feb)|(Mar)|(Apr)|(May)|(Jun)|(Jul)|(Aug)|(Sep)|(Oct)|(Nov)|(Dec)){1}\s?\d{1,2},\s?\d{4}

It works fine. But it do not check the input date is less than 28,30 or 31 based on month . example :the month December have 31 days. If the user entered greater than 31 ,the expression must caught that. Any ideas to achieve this using regular exptression??

Answer 1

The validation that you want to do (excluding invalid date ranges based on month) is really unsuited for a regular expression. You should parse the month, date, and year, and then do your validation based on the parsed values. Trying to do it via a regex will be painful and difficult to maintain.

Alternately, have you considered just using DateTime.Parse ?

Answer 2

If you think that's bad, just wait till you try supporting leap years. Yep, as is usually the case with "how do I do (insert difficult task) with regex?" questions, the best approach is to just avoid regular expressions entirely. Can you use a RangeValidator instead? Otherwise, as JSBangs noted, you could use a custom validator with DateTime's parsing methods.