Regex to match all of a set except certain ones

Question

I'm sure this has been asked before, but I can't seem to find it (or know the proper wording to search for)

Basically I want a regex that matches all non-alphanumeric except hyphens. So basically match \W+ except exclude '-' I'm not sure how to exclude specific ones from a premade set.

Answer 1

[^\w-]+

will do just that. Match any characters not in the \w set except hyphen.

Answer 2

\W is a shorthand for [^\w]. So:

[^\w-]+

A bit of background:

• […] defines a set
• [^…] negates a set
• Generally, every \v (smallcase) set is negated by a \V (uppercase) where V is any letter that defines a set.
• for international characters, you may want to look into [[:alpha:]] and [[:alnum:]]

Answer 3

You can use:

[^a-zA-Z0-9_-]

or

[^\w-]

to match a single non-hyphen, non-alphanumeric. To match one or more of then prefix with a +