VBA regex to find special characters in reverse

Question

I'm trying to find special characters in a cell using the below code. However, still not getting desired out.

i created the regex in reverse, where it will allow few special characters and alpha numeric, as we don't know/have the special characters list.

 Function spltrack(cell As String) 'Use Regular Expressiosn for grabbing the input and automatically filter it Dim regEx As New RegExp With regEx .Global = True .MultiLine = True .IgnoreCase = True .Pattern = "[0-9][a-zA-Z]|(\\[\\]())|.+-/|'&%#_:,!–" End With If regEx.Test(cell) Then spltrack = "Not Found" Else spltrack = "Found" End If End Function

Is anything wrong with code or any other better way?

Answer 1

Assuming you want to return true if there are characters other than letters, digits and whitespace:

With regEx
    .Pattern = "[^0-9a-zA-Z\s()[\]:'""/&%#!_+,.|-]"
End With

If regEx.Test(cell) Then
    spltrack = "Found"
Else
    spltrack = "Not Found"
End If

Explanation

                         EXPLANATION
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  [^0-9a-zA-                any character except: '0' to '9', 'a' to
  Z\s()[\]:'"/&%#!_+,.     'z', 'A' to 'Z', whitespace (\n, \r, \t,
  |-]                      \f, and " "), '(', ')', '[', '\]', ':',
                           ''', '"', '/', '&', '%', '#', '!', '_',
                           '+', ',', '.', '|', '-'