Regular expression accepts all characters with at least five characters

Question

I've seen the following regular expression around the web.

(?=^.{8,}$)((?=.*\d)|(?=.*\W+))(?![.\n])(?=.*[A-Z])(?=.*[a-z]).*$

It validates only if the string:

• contain at least (1) upper case letter
• contain at least (1) lower case letter
• contain at least (1) number or special character
• contain at least (8) characters in length

But I am trying to make it contain at least 5 characters while allowing the user to use whichever characters they choose.

Answer 1

The regular expression .{5} will match any string containing at least five characters. Note that, other than newlines, the characters can be anything, so a string consisting of five spaces will match.