Question

I have to process a string that could include all sorts of non-standard characters and I’ve been asked to provide a regular expression that will match and remove all characters that are non-alphanumeric except punctuation and spaces.

Is there a way to do this?

Answer 1

From regular-expressions.info:

\p{P} or \p{Punctuation}: any kind of punctuation character.

\p{L} or \p{Letter}: any kind of letter from any language.

\p{Nd} or \p{Decimal_Digit_Number}: a digit zero through nine in any script except ideographic scripts.

Your regex would then look like this

[^\p{L}\p{Nd}\p{P} ]+

This would match anything that is not a letter, not a digit, not punctuation and not a space.