Time Validation Regular Expression

[benj0323]

I can't find a regular expression to validate time in the following formats:

HH:MM AM or PM or am or pm

Can anyone help me out here? I've tried writing my own about 50 times and I cant get it to work, and I can't find any on the internet that work correctly.

Any help is greatl appreciated. Thank you very much.

[coopster]

What have you got so far?

[ergophobe]

So it looks like twelve-hour time. How about something like

[01][0-9]:[0-6][0-9]?[aApP]\.?[mM]\.?

[coopster]

Close, ergophobe, but as is, the regular expression would fail as it would return invalid time formats. For example...

19:01 am 
00:69 am

...would be incorrectly accepted. We'll have to expand our pattern to catch that. Below are two similar regular expressions, the only difference being how many spaces must be present between the digits and the "am/pm".

// Must have one and only one space... 
"/(0[1-9]¦1[0-2]):[0-5][0-9] ([ap]m¦[AP]M)/" 
// Must have at least one space... 
"/(0[1-9]¦1[0-2]):[0-5][0-9]\s+([ap]m¦[AP]M)/"

Don't forget that the vertical pipe "¦" symbol is modified by posting in this forum -- you must replace it with the solid vertical pipe character from your keyboard.

[ergophobe]

LOL (which is the first time I have *ever* used that acronym). At least I got a chuckle looking at it again.

[01][0-9]:[0-6][0-9]?[aApP]\.?[mM]\.?

The part in italics was a mere oversight; the part in bold was just plain stupidity - sixty minutes, so you need a six right?

[coopster]

hehe. I did like the optional "dots" between the am/pm though.

To explain it a bit better for benj0323:

If the time format is

01, or 02, or 03...or 09 
OR 
10, or 11, or 12 
followed by a colon 
followed by 00, or 01, or 02...or 59 
followed by a space 
followed by am or pm or AM or PM

then it's a match.