Question

I am stuck trying to create a regex that will allow for letters, numbers, and the following chars: _ – ! ? . ,

Here is what I have so far:

/^[-\'a-zA-Z0-9_!\?,.\s]+$/      //not escaping the ?

and this version too:

/^[-\'a-zA-Z0-9_!\?,.\s]+$/     //attempting to escape the ? 

Neither of these seem to be able to match the following:

“Oh why, oh why is this regex not working! It’s getting pretty frustrating? Frustrating – that is to say the least. Hey look, an underscore_ I wonder if it will match this time around?”

Can somebody point out what I am doing wrong? I must point out that my script takes the user input (the paragraph in quotes in this case) and strips all white space so actual input has no white space.

Thanks!

UPDATE:
Thanks to Lix’s advice, this is what I have so far:

/^[-\'a-zA-Z0-9_!\?,\.\s]+$/

However, it’s still not working??

UPDATE2
Ok, based on input this is what’s happening.
User inputs string, then I run the string through following functions:

$comment = preg_replace('/\s+/', '',   
htmlspecialchars(strip_tags(trim($user_comment_orig))));

So in the end, user input is just a long string of chars without any spaces. Then that string of chars is run using:

preg_match("@^[-_!?.,a-zA-Z0-9]+$@",$comment) 

What could possibly be causing trouble here?

FINAL UPDATE:

Ended up using this regex:

"@[-'A-Z0-9_?!,.]+@i"

Thanks all! lol, ya’ll are going to kill me once you find out where my mistake was!

Ok, so I had this piece of code:

if(!preg_match($pattern,$comment) || strlen($comment) < 2 || strlen($comment) > 60){

GEEZ!!! I never bothered to look at the strlen part of the code. Of course it was going to fail every time…I only allowed 60 chars!!!!

Answer 1

When in doubt, it’s always safe to escape non alphanumeric characters in a class for matching, so the following is fine:

/^[\-\'a-zA-Z0-9\_\!\?\,\.\s]+$/

When run through a regular expression tester, this finds a match with your target just fine, so I would suggest you may have a problem elsewhere if that doesn’t take care of everything.

I assume you’re not including the quotes you used around the target when actually trying for a match? Since you didn’t build double quote matching in…

Can somebody point out what I am doing wrong? I must point out that my script takes the user input (the paragraph in quotes in this case) and strips all white space so actual input has no white space.

in which case you don’t need the \s if it’s working correctly.