Regex Javascript 0-9a-zA-Z plus whitespace, commas etc

Question

Hiya,

Can anyone help me with this regex? I need something which will ALLOW:

0-9 a-z A-Z spaces hyphens apostrophes

But disallow all other special characters.

I've got this, but it's not working:

"regex":"/^[0-9a-zA-Z/ /-'_]+$/",

Thanks for any help!

Answer 1

You should remove the double quotes around the regex:

"regex": /^[0-9a-zA-Z \-'_]+$/,

Also make sure you use backslashes to escape special characters, not forward slashes.

Answer 2

If you want to match underscores as well as alphanumeric charactars (as your code implies), you can use

"regex": /^[\w '-]+$/,

Also, check out this online regular expression testing tool.

Answer 3

You could alternatively remove the outer forward slashes and pass it to the constructor of RegExp.

"regex" : new RegExp("^[0-9a-zA-Z \-'_]+$")

Which is equivalent to the /pattern/modifiers syntax (the second argument is an optional string of modifier characters). The \w character class matches alphanumeric characters, including underscore, so I think you can shorten your pattern quite a bit by using it.

^[\w \-']+$