正则表达式阻止特殊字符

Question

I'm using PHP Version 5.3.27

I'm trying to get my regex to match whitespace, and special characters such as ♦◘•♠♥☻, the other known special characters which are %$#&*@ are already matched, but somehow the ones I mentioned before are not matched..

Current regex

preg_match('/^[a-zA-Z0-9[:space:]]+$/', $login)

My apology for asking two questions on the same subject. I hope this one is clear enough for you.

Answer 1

Your regex doesn't contain any reference to the special characters mentioned. You would need to include them in the character class for them to be matched.

To match those kinds of special characters you can use the unicode values.

Example:

\u0000-\uFFFF
\x00-\xFF

The top is UTF-16, the bottom is UTF-8.

Refer to a UTF-8/16 character table online to match up your symbols with their unicode values, then create a range to keep your expression short.

Answer 2

use this

[\W]+ 

will match any non-word character.

Answer 3

You can use the \\p{S} character class (or \\p{So} ) that matches symbol characters (that includes this kind of characters: ╭₠☪♛♣♞♉♆☯♫) :

preg_match('/^[a-zA-Z0-9\h\p{S}]+$/u', $login)

To find more possibilities you can check the pcre documentation at: http://www.pcre.org/pcre.txt

If you need to be more precise, the best way is to use character ranges in the character class. You can find code of characters here .