How to write a regular expression for excluding some special characters from string?

Question

I want to exclude the following characters from my string:

\--
'
<
>

Please tell me how to write a regular expression for this.

Answer 1

If your regex dialect supports lookaheads:

^(?:(?!\\--|['<>]).)*$

However, in some languages it might be cleaner to have a simple manual check rather than use a regex.

Answer 2

string s = Regex.Replace(SomeString, "[\-'<>]", "");

Hope this helps.

Answer 3

Personally I'd just use string.Replace. Regular expressions are great, but should be used wisely.

Answer 4

If the question is how to remove \-- and ' and < and > from a string then this regex does the job:

['<>]|\\--

or in C#

resultString = Regex.Replace(subjectString, @"['<>]|\\--", "");