Question

I’m sure this has been asked before, but I can’t seem to find it (or know the proper wording to search for)

Basically I want a regex that matches all non-alphanumeric except hyphens. So basically match \W+ except exclude ‘-‘ I’m not sure how to exclude specific ones from a premade set.

Answer 1

\W is a shorthand for [^\w]. So:

[^\w-]+

A bit of background:

• […] defines a set
• [^…] negates a set
• Generally, every \v (smallcase) set is negated by a \V (uppercase) where V is any letter that defines a set.
• for international characters, you may want to look into [[:alpha:]] and [[:alnum:]]