Java Regular Expressions Special characters and the & sign

Question

I have a regular expression that searches for all uppercase words but I need a regular expression that will search for special characters and the "&" Character. For example I would need a regular expression that would find words like "A&E" or "A/V". Below is my standard Regular Expression for all uppercase words.

String twoPlusUCRegEx = "[A-Z][A-Z]+\\s";

Answer 1

Just include the special characters you want in the second [AZ] category. For example:

"[A-Z][A-Z&/]+\\s"

If you want all US-ASCII punctuation, you can use a POSIX character class:

"[A-Z][A-Z\p{Punct}]+\\s"

You might also want to put a word boundary or the like at the start of your re, so you don't match strings like "aAB".