Validating Forms with the HTML5 Pattern Attribute

In the past, validating forms in the client has typically required doing some heavy lifting with JavaScript. But you may not know HTML5 changes all that. Browsers now check that the content of an input match its type (and we’ve got new types like email, url and number to make that even more useful). But, what you might not know about is the pattern attribute, which lets us use regular expressions directly in HTML to specify what format the user’s input should have.

In this session, Chris Lienert will look at some of the common regex patterns you can use to validate user input, coupled with some of the many tricks he’s learned to help users complete those forms we all love to hate.