Regex for alphanumeric and special characters

Question

I need to define a regular expression that accepts Alphanumeric and the following special characters: @#$%&*()-_+][';:?.,!

I've come up with:

string pattern = @"[a-zA-Z0-9@#$%&*+\-_(),+':;?.,![]\s\\/]+$";

But this doesn't seem to be working. Can someone please let me know what is missing?

Answer 1

The [] in the middle need to be escaped*:

\[\]

You also probably want to anchor the start of the string with a ^ .

---

_{* Probably just the ] but I like to do both for balance.}

Answer 2

When defining a character class, you will need to escape the closing bracket ] within, just like " ^ ", " - " and the escaping sequence \\ itself, which you have done correctly:

string pattern = @"[a-zA-Z0-9@#$%&*+\-_(),+':;?.,![\]\s\\/]+$";
                                    ^              ^   ^

Answer 3

Some of those characters need to be escaped (*, +, etc). The easiest way is to simply escape them all:

string pattern = @"[a-zA-Z0-9\@\#\$\%\&\*\(\)\-\_\+\]\[\'\;\:\?\.\,\!]+$";