Question

As I am trying to read more about regular expressions in C#, I just want to make sure of my conclusion that I made.
for the following expression “.*[^a-zA-Z0-9_].* “, the ” .* ” at the beginning and end are useless, is that right ? because as I understood, that “.*” means zero or more occurrence of any character, but being followed by “[^a-zA-Z0-9_]” which means any character other than any combination of letters and digits case insensitive, makes “.*” useless to be added before and after “[^a-zA-Z0-9_]”, is that right ?

Here is the code I am using to check if the expressions matches

// Here we call Regex.Match.
Match match = Regex.Match("anytest#", ".*[^a-z A-Z0-9_].*");
//Match match = Regex.Match("anytest#", "[^a-z A-Z0-9_]");

// Here we check the Match instance.
if (match.Success)
    Console.WriteLine("error");
else
    Console.WriteLine("no error");

Answer 1

.*[^a-zA-Z0-9_].* will match the entire input as long as there is a non-alphanumeric/underscore somewhere in the input. [^a-zA-Z0-9_] will match only a single non-alphanumeric/underscore character (most likely the last one, if you’re using the default greedy matching) if it is somewhere in the input. Which one you want depends on the input and what you want to do once you find out if a non-alphanumeric/underscore character exists in the input.