Regular expression for excluding special characters

Question

I am having trouble coming up with a regular expression which would essentially black list certain special characters.

I need to use this to validate data in input fields (in a Java Web app). We want to allow users to enter any digit, letter (we need to include accented characters, ex. French or German) and some special characters such as '-. etc.

How do I blacklist characters such as <>%$ etc?

Answer 1

I would just white list the characters.

^[a-zA-Z0-9äöüÄÖÜ]*$

Building a black list is equally simple with regex but you might need to add much more characters - there are a lot of Chinese symbols in unicode ... ;)

^[^<>%$]*$

The expression [^(many characters here)] just matches any character that is not listed.

Answer 2

To exclude certain characters ( <, >, %, and $), you can make a regular expression like this:

[<>%\$]

This regular expression will match all inputs that have a blacklisted character in them. The brackets define a character class, and the \ is necessary before the dollar sign because dollar sign has a special meaning in regular expressions.

To add more characters to the black list, just insert them between the brackets; order does not matter.

According to some Java documentation for regular expressions, you could use the expression like this:

Pattern p = Pattern.compile("[<>%\$]");
Matcher m = p.matcher(unsafeInputString);
if (m.matches())
{
    // Invalid input: reject it, or remove/change the offending characters.
}
else
{
    // Valid input.
}

Answer 3

Even in 2009, it seems too many had a very limited idea of what designing for the WORLDWIDE web involved. In 2015, unless designing for a specific country, a blacklist is the only way to accommodate the vast number of characters that may be valid.

The characters to blacklist then need to be chosen according what is illegal for the purpose for which the data is required.

However, sometimes it pays to break down the requirements, and handle each separately. Here look-ahead is your friend. These are sections bounded by (?=) for positive, and (?!) for negative, and effectively become AND blocks, because when the block is processed, if not failed, the regex processor will begin at the start of the text with the next block. Effectively, each look-ahead block will be preceded by the ^, and if its pattern is greedy, include up to the $. Even the ancient VB6/VBA (Office) 5.5 regex engine supports look-ahead.

So, to build up a full regular expression, start with the look-ahead blocks, then add the blacklisted character block before the final $.

For example, to limit the total numbers of characters, say between 3 and 15 inclusive, start with the positive look-ahead block (?=^.{3,15}$). Note that this needed its own ^ and $ to ensure that it covered all the text.

Now, while you might want to allow _ and -, you may not want to start or end with them, so add the two negative look-ahead blocks, (?!^[_-].+) for starts, and (?!.+[_-]$) for ends.

If you don't want multiple _ and -, add a negative look-ahead block of (?!.*[_-]{2,}). This will also exclude _- and -_ sequences.

If there are no more look-ahead blocks, then add the blacklist block before the $, such as [^<>[\]{\}|\\\/^~%# :;,$%?\0-\cZ]+, where the \0-\cZ excludes null and control characters, including NL (\n) and CR (\r). The final + ensures that all the text is greedily included.

Within the Unicode domain, there may well be other code-points or blocks that need to be excluded as well, but certainly a lot less than all the blocks that would have to be included in a whitelist.

The whole regex of all of the above would then be

(?=^.{3,15}$)(?!^[_-].+)(?!.+[_-]$)(?!.*[_-]{2,})[^<>[\]{}|\\\/^~%# :;,$%?\0-\cZ]+$

which you can check out live on https://regex101.com/, for pcre (php), javascript and python regex engines. I don't know where the java regex fits in those, but you may need to modify the regex to cater for its idiosyncrasies.

If you want to include spaces, but not _, just swap them every where in the regex.

The most useful application for this technique is for the pattern attribute for HTML input fields, where a single expression is required, returning a false for failure, thus making the field invalid, allowing input:invalid css to highlight it, and stopping the form being submitted.

Answer 4

The negated set of everything that is not alphanumeric & underscore for ASCII chars:

/[^\W]/g

For email or username validation i've used the following expression that allows 4 standard special characters - _ . @

/^[-.@_a-z0-9]+$/gi

For a strict alphanumeric only expression use:

/^[a-z0-9]+$/gi

Test @ RegExr.com

Answer 5

I guess it depends what language you are targeting. In general, something like this should work:

[^<>%$]

The "[]" construct defines a character class, which will match any of the listed characters. Putting "^" as the first character negates the match, ie: any character OTHER than one of those listed.

You may need to escape some of the characters within the "[]", depending on what language/regex engine you are using.

Answer 6

Its usually better to whitelist characters you allow, rather than to blacklist characters you don't allow. both from a security standpoint, and from an ease of implementation standpoint.

If you do go down the blacklist route, here is an example, but be warned, the syntax is not simple.

http://groups.google.com/group/regex/browse_thread/thread/0795c1b958561a07

If you want to whitelist all the accent characters, perhaps using unicode ranges would help? Check out this link.

http://www.regular-expressions.info/unicode.html

Answer 7

Do you really want to blacklist specific characters or rather whitelist the allowed charachters?

I assume that you actually want the latter. This is pretty simple (add any additional symbols to whitelist into the [\-] group):

^(?:\p{L}\p{M}*|[\-])*$

Edit: Optimized the pattern with the input from the comments

Answer 8

Here's all the french accented characters: àÀâÂäÄáÁéÉèÈêÊëËìÌîÎïÏòÒôÔöÖùÙûÛüÜçÇ’ñ

I would google a list of German accented characters. There aren't THAT many. You should be able to get them all.

For URLS I Replace accented URLs with regular letters like so:

string beforeConversion = "àÀâÂäÄáÁéÉèÈêÊëËìÌîÎïÏòÒôÔöÖùÙûÛüÜçÇ’ñ";
string afterConversion = "aAaAaAaAeEeEeEeEiIiIiIoOoOoOuUuUuUcC'n";
for (int i = 0; i < beforeConversion.Length; i++) {

     cleaned = Regex.Replace(cleaned, beforeConversion[i].ToString(), afterConversion[i].ToString());
}

There's probably a more efficient way, mind you.

Answer 9

Why do you consider regex the best tool for this? If your purpose is to detect whether an illegal character is present in a string, testing each character in a loop will be both simpler and more efficient than constructing a regex.

Answer 10

Use This one

^(?=[a-zA-Z0-9~@#$^*()_+=[\]{}|\\,.?: -]*$)(?!.*[<>'"/;`%])

Answer 11

I strongly suspect it's going to be easier to come up with a list of the characters that ARE allowed vs. the ones that aren't -- and once you have that list, the regex syntax becomes quite straightforward. So put me down as another vote for "whitelist".