preg_match some characters

Question

I need an regex to my preg_match(), it should preg (allow) the following characters:

String can contain only letters, numbers, and the following punctuation marks:

full stop (.)
comma (,)
dash (-)
underscore (_)

I have no idea , how it can be done on regex, but I think there is a way!

If only there was a way to find out more on preg syntax.. :P — Rijk, Oct 18 '11 at 12:42
Yes, this can be done. See the manual on http://www.php.net/manual/en/regexp.reference.character-classes.php or some of the tools http://stackoverflow.com/questions/32282/regex-testing-tools — mario, Oct 18 '11 at 12:43

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 18 '11 at 12:42

^[\p{L}\p{N}.,_-]*$

will match a string that contains only (Unicode) letters, digits or the "special characters" you mentioned. [...] is a character class, meaning "one of the characters contained here". You'll need to use the /u Unicode modifier for this to work:

preg_match(`/^[\p{L}\p{N}.,_-]*$/u', $mystring);

If you only care about ASCII letters, it's easier:

^[\w.,-]*$

or, in PHP:

preg_match(`/^[\w.,-]*$/', $mystring);

preg_match some characters

1 Answers1