CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpregex
omidh
omidh

Reputation: 2822

PHP Regular Expression pattern accepts characters that are not allowed

preg_match('~^[a-zA-Z0-9!@#$%^*()-_+=.]+$~', $string)

This is the pattern I used in my code, What I wanted to do was telling users that they're only allowed to use these characters. But the problem is that it works for some characters and not for some others. For example it doesn't allow a string like "john&john" but it allows "test<>" even though I didn't enter '<' and '>' in the pattern!

Upvotes: 0

Views: 46

Answers (4)

phoenix.mstu
phoenix.mstu

Reputation: 164

I always test my regexps with tools like that https://regex101.com/

You must escape some special characters in your regexp:

^[a-zA-Z0-9!@#\$%\^\*\(\)\-_\+=\.]+$

Upvotes: 1

anubhava
anubhava

Reputation: 785196

Problem is presence of an un-escaped hyphen in the middle of character class that is acting as range. Use this regex:

preg_match('~^[\w!@#$%^*()+=.-]+$~', $string)

Upvotes: 0

Nat
Nat

Reputation: 324

this will work:

preg_match('~^[a-zA-Z0-9!@#$%^*()_+=.-]+$~', $string)

Upvotes: 0

marekful
marekful

Reputation: 15351

Most of those characters in the pattern have special meaning for the regex engine and must be escaped with backslash:

^[a-zA-Z0-9\!\@\#\$\%\^\*\(\)\-\_\+\=\.]+$

https://regex101.com/r/kH7hD8/1

Upvotes: 2

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