CODEWITHSUNDEEP
regex
Twister1002
Twister1002

Reputation: 557

Using regular expressions: making sure a field contains a special character and numbers

I am trying to make a regular expression that checks a field and make sure it includes (special characters or numbers) including all the other character as well. I am failing to do it correctly.

I've been using some regular expression sites like http://www.gskinner.com/RegExr/ to give me some help and make sure I'm getting the right thing, but I'm not.

The closest I've gotten is this: 

(?!^[0-9]*$)(?!^[a-zA-Z!@#$%^&*()_+=<>?]*$)^([a-zA-Z!@#$%^&*()_+=<>?0-9]{6,15})$

It checks for everything although it is required that there is a number in it. But I need it to be required to have a number OR special character.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 498

Answers (2)

Wug
Wug

Reputation: 13196

This requires a number AND a special character:

[^\s\w].*\d|\d.*[^\s\w]

This requires a number OR a special character:

\d|[^\s\w]

The pipe character '|' means OR.

This one matches an entire line if there is both a special character AND a number:

.*(:?[^\s\w].*\d|\d.*[^\s\w]).*

This one matches an entire line if there is a special character OR a number:

.*(?:\d|[^\s\w]).*

Upvotes: 1

aquinas
aquinas

Reputation: 23796

Special characters or numbers? Well, [^A-Za-z_ ] is probably good enough then.

Edit:

So, if you are trying to do password validation, then this is really simple with positive lookaheads. Shameless stolen from: http://www.mkyong.com/regular-expressions/how-to-validate-password-with-regular-expression/

(           # Start of group
  (?=.*\d)      #   must contains one digit from 0-9
  (?=.*[a-z])       #   must contains one lowercase characters
  (?=.*[A-Z])       #   must contains one uppercase characters
  (?=.*[@#$%])      #   must contains one special symbols in the list "@#$%"
              .     #     match anything with previous condition checking
                {6,20}  #        length at least 6 characters and maximum of 20 
)

Upvotes: 0

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