Question

I’m using the following regular expression to match one or more special characters for a password strength test.

if (password.match(/\W+/)) points++;

This doesn’t seem to match the underscore ‘_’ as a special character. Why is this and how can I fix it?

Answer 1

It is because \W is the same as [^\w], while \w contains a-z, A-Z, 0-9, and _ as well.

In order to fix it just add _ character separately:

if (password.match(/[\W_]+/)) points++;