Regex to allow alphanumeric, spaces, some special characters

Question

I have this ^[a-zA-Z0-9 @&$]*$, but not working for me in few cases.

If someone types

• A string that only consists of digits (e.g. 1234567)
• A string starting with a special character (e.g. &123abc)

need to be rejected. Note that a special char can be in the middle and at the end.

Answer 1

You seem to need to avoid matching strings that only consist of digits and make sure the strings start with an alphanumeric. I assume you also need to be able to match empty strings (the original regex matches empty strings).

That is why I suggest

^(?!\d+$)(?:[a-zA-Z0-9][a-zA-Z0-9 @&$]*)?$

See the regex demo

Details

• ^ - start of string
• (?!\d+$) - the negative lookahead that fails the match if a string is numeric only
• (?:[a-zA-Z0-9][a-zA-Z0-9 @&$]*)? - an optional sequence of:
  • [a-zA-Z0-9] - a digit or a letter
  • [a-zA-Z0-9 @&$]* - 0+ digits, letters, spaces, @, & or $ chars
• $ - end of string.

Answer 2

you can do it with the following regex

^(?!\d+$)\w+\S+

check the demo here