Question

I am trying to add wild characters to my current alphanumeric only regular expression to make the password validation stronger. I am not trying to require the user to enter wild characters, just allowing them to enter wild characters.

'/^[a-z0-9]{8,16}$/i'

I am also using cakephp and doing the validation in the model if that helps, but not really needed for this answer.

            'rule' => '/^[a-z0-9]{8,16}$/i',
            'on' => 'create',
            'allowEmpty' => true

Answer 1

Just add the characters you want to allow to the character class ([...]):

/^[a-z0-9!#$%&]{8,16}$/i