'Regex, every non-alphanumeric character except white space or colon

How can I do this one anywhere?

Basically, I am trying to match all kinds of miscellaneous characters such as ampersands, semicolons, dollar signs, etc.

regex


Solution 1:[1]

This should do it:

[^a-zA-Z\d\s:]

Solution 2:[2]

If you want to treat accented latin characters (eg. à Ñ) as normal letters (ie. avoid matching them too), you'll also need to include the appropriate Unicode range (\u00C0-\u00FF) in your regex, so it would look like this:

/[^a-zA-Z\d\s:\u00C0-\u00FF]/g
  • ^ negates what follows
  • a-zA-Z matches upper and lower case letters
  • \d matches digits
  • \s matches white space (if you only want to match spaces, replace this with a space)
  • : matches a colon
  • \u00C0-\u00FF matches the Unicode range for accented latin characters.

nb. Unicode range matching might not work for all regex engines, but the above certainly works in Javascript (as seen in this pen on Codepen).

nb2. If you're not bothered about matching underscores, you could replace a-zA-Z\d with \w, which matches letters, digits, and underscores.

Solution 3:[3]

Try this:

[^a-zA-Z0-9 :]

JavaScript example:

"!@#$%* ABC def:123".replace(/[^a-zA-Z0-9 :]/g, ".")

See a online example:

http://jsfiddle.net/vhMy8/

Solution 4:[4]

If you mean "non-alphanumeric characters", try to use this:

var reg =/[^a-zA-Z0-9]/g      //[^abc]

Solution 5:[5]

In JavaScript:

/[^\w_]/g

^ negation, i.e. select anything not in the following set

\w any word character (i.e. any alphanumeric character, plus underscore)

_ negate the underscore, as it's considered a 'word' character

Usage example - const nonAlphaNumericChars = /[^\w_]/g;

Solution 6:[6]

No alphanumeric, white space or '_'. 

var reg = /[^\w\s)]|[_]/g;

Solution 7:[7]

This regex works for C#, PCRE and Go to name a few.

It doesn't work for JavaScript on Chrome from what RegexBuddy says. But there's already an example for that here.

This main part of this is:

\p{L}

which represents \p{L} or \p{Letter} any kind of letter from any language.`

The full regex itself: [^\w\d\s:\p{L}]

Example: https://regex101.com/r/K59PrA/2

Solution 8:[8]

Try to add this:

^[^a-zA-Z\d\s:]*$

This has worked for me... :)

Sources

This article follows the attribution requirements of Stack Overflow and is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Source: Stack Overflow

Solution Source
Solution 1 Peter Mortensen
Solution 2
Solution 3 Peter Mortensen
Solution 4 Peter Mortensen
Solution 5 Chris Halcrow
Solution 6 Vasyl Gutnyk
Solution 7 Peter Mortensen
Solution 8 Peter Mortensen

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