I'm trying to figure out how to get my regular expression to accept certain special characters: ', , and - along with alphanumeric characters. I've had a stab at it but to no avail, and I'm quite new to regex, can anyone help?

Here was my attempt which, surprisingly, didn't work...

/^\d+/,\'\-\$/i

I'm trying to figure out how to get my regular expression to accept certain special characters: ', , and - along with alphanumeric characters. I've had a stab at it but to no avail, and I'm quite new to regex, can anyone help?

Here was my attempt which, surprisingly, didn't work...

/^\d+/,\'\-\$/i

• javascript
• regex

• 1 This is just JavaScript, not jQuery. (In truth, it could be construed as language-agnostic, to some extent.) – Reid Commented Feb 21, 2011 at 13:58

3 Answers 3

Something like this?

/[0-9a-zA-Z',-]+/

if it has to be a full string, you can use

/^[0-9a-zA-Z',-]+$/

Try

/^[\w',-]*$/

(assuming you mean ASCII letters, digits and underscore by "alphanumeric").

\d is shorthand for [0-9], which is not any alphanumeric character.

/^[\w,'-]+$/i

should do the trick.

What this is saying:

^ - match the start of the line
[ - match any of the following characters (group #1)
    \w - any word (meaning differs depending on locale;
         generally, any letter, number or the `-` character.)
    ,  - a ma
    '  - an apostrophe
    -  - a dash
] - end group #1
+ - one or more times
$ - match the end of the line
/i - set case-insensitivity.