Question

I’m working in php and want to set some rules for a submitted text field. I want to allow letters, numbers, spaces, and the symbols # ' , -

This is what I have:

/^(a-z,0-9+# )+$/i

That seems to work but when I add the ' or - symbols I get errors.

Answer 1

Almost there. What you’re looking for is called character classes. These are denoted by the use of square brackets. For example

/^[-a-z0-9+#,' ]+$/i

To include the hyphen character, it needs to be the first or last character in the class.

Edit

As you want to include the single quote and you’re using PHP where regular expressions must be represented as strings, be careful with how you quote the pattern. In this case, you can use either of

$pattern = "/^[-a-z0-9+#,' ]+\$/i"; // or
$pattern = '/^[-a-z0-9+#,\' ]+$/i';