正则表达式-随处匹配特定字符

Question

I'm trying to match against a string that is a mix of letters and special characters.

ex:

THIS!IS*A STRING

I've tried to put together a (probably noobish) regex that does this for the characters I want (Java):

"\\w{1,40}&*-*\\.*`*\\(*\\)*\\/*\\\\*!*,*\\** *"

It seems to work but only when the special character is at the end of the line. Is there a way to match it regardless of position?

EDIT1:

Spec:

Characters allowed are: AZ az 0-9 – . ' ) ( & / \\ ! , * space AZ az 0-9 – . ' ) ( & / \\ ! , * space .

EDIT2:

Getting closer I think:

"[\\w-.`()&/\\!,* ]+"

Seems to be giving me what I want but when I add a range I get an exception:

"[\\w{1,40}-.`()&/\\!,* ]+"
thread "main" java.util.regex.PatternSyntaxException: Illegal character   range near index 10
[\w{1,40}-.`()&/\!,* ]+
          ^

Answer 1

So I think I have achieved it by...

The hyphen is a range char and needs to be at the start or end of the character class.

I shifted the range outside the character class and this looks to have fixed the issue of it being ignored if it's inside a character class.

"[\\w.`()&/\\!,* -]{1,40}+"

Answer 2

Your code works fine:

    String s = "THIS!IS*A STRING";
    Pattern p = Pattern.compile("\\w{1,40}&*-*\\.*`*\\(*\\)*\\/*\\\\*!*,*\\** *");
    Matcher m = p.matcher(s);
    while (m.find())
        System.out.println(m.group());

The results are:

    THIS!
    IS*
    A 
    STRING

If you want to use String.matches, you should extend the pattern to match whole strings.

   String s = "THIS!IS*A STRING";
   System.out.println(s.matches("(\\w{1,40}&*-*\\.*`*\\(*\\)*\\/*\\\\*!*,*\\** *)*"));
   // -> true