Question

I have a regular expression to validate a password to contain numbers, lowercase and uppercase characters.

The one below works fine. But when I use this in jQuery Validation:

txtPassword: {
    required: true,
    regex: Regex
}

Regex = (?=^.{8,16}$)(?=.*\d)(?=.*[a-z])(?=.*[A-Z])(?=.*[!@#$%^&*()_+}{":;/'?/>.<,])(?!.*\s).*$

But the issue is single quote ' in Javascript. Can some body please help me to resolve this? Thankyou.

Answer 1

There are several things that need to fixed in this regex:

• In your lookahead checks for the password, you have a period without
  a quantifier. Hence it will always fail that check. For e.g., for the
  number check, you should have (?=.*\d) instead of (?=.\d).
• You do not escape characters with a forward-slash /, instead you
  use a backslash \. You have it escaped incorrectly with a
  forwardslash in the last character class.
• The only special characters or metacharacters inside a character
  class are the closing bracket (]), the backslash (\), the caret (^)
  and the hyphen (-). Hence it is not due to the single quote. The culprit is your caret which is not escaped.

Try this regex where the caret ^ is escaped instead of the quote ':

(?=^.{8,16}$)(?=.*\d)(?=.*[a-z])(?=.*[A-Z])(?=.*[!@#$%\^&*()_+}{":;'?/>.<,])(?!.*\s)^.*$

---

I am assuming by your question, you meant a Regexp to validate a password with:

• at least 1 number
• at least 1 lowerchase character
• at least 1 uppercase character
• at least 1 special character out of the set !@#$%^&*()_+}{":;'?/>.<,
• length between 8 and 16 characters

If this is true, please update your question with the clarified requirement.

---

Play with the regex in RegexPal

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jQuery based code. Fiddle with this here:

var regex = /(?=^.{8,16}$)(?=.*\d)(?=.*[a-z])(?=.*[A-Z])(?=.*[!@#$%\^&*()_+}{":;'?/>.<,])(?!.*\s)^.*$/g;
//if(regex.test($('#txtPassword').val())){ alert('Match'); }else{alert('No Match')}
if (regex.test('P@sSw0rD')) {
    alert('Match');
} else {
    alert('No Match');
}​