Question

Wondering if someone can tell me why this regular expression doesn’t work.

Expression -> ^[A-Za-z0-9$&!#-_?:;\"']+$

The problem is, it’s matching against characters not in the set. For example, the word match properly matches and the word match~ does not, but match@ and match! incorrectly match.

I’m using java to match it, and the matching should be fairly straight forward with the code below:

        RE re = new RE(expression);
        return re.match(value);

I know it’s probably something ridiculously simple that I’m missing, but if anyone has any thoughts on it, I’d greatly appreciate it!

Answer 1

The problem is the hyphen - in your character set. Your are accepting characters from # to _.

Change it to ^[-A-Za-z0-9$&!#_?:;\"']+$ or escape -.