Reputation: 27
Can anyone help me create a regular expression that accepts alphanumeric (numbers and letters only) and dashes and white spaces.
It shouldn't accept consecutive dashes and consecutive white spaces. or a dash followed by a white space and vice versa. It should always begin and end with alphanumeric characters as well.
Thank you so much. Any help would be very much appreciated. (^-^)v
'Abcde' , '324 3a-32' : valid
'-' , '324 3a - 32' , '-2323 d-', 'z- -a' : invalid
Thanks guys for all your help. v(",)\
Upvotes: 1
Views: 4807
Reputation: 92986
An ASCII answer
^(?!.*[- ]{2})(?!^[- ])(?!.*[- ]$)[A-Za-z0-9- ]+$
See it here on Regexr
^
Matches the start of the string
$
Matches the end of the string
[A-Za-z0-9- ]+
Matches the characters you want, at least one
The negative lookaheads
(?!.*[- ]{2})
ensures that there are not - or space in a row
(?!^[- ])(?!.*[- ]$)
those two ensures that it does not start and not end with these characters.
For an unicode answer you should specify the language you are using
for some you can use \p{L}
See here to describe a unicode code point that has the property "letter".
Upvotes: 1
Reputation: 75232
Try this:
^[A-Za-z0-9]+(?:[\s-][A-Za-z0-9]+)*$
When the first [A-Za-z0-9]+
runs out of letters and digits, the [\s-]
inside the group tries to match a hyphen or a whitespace character. If it succeeds, the second [A-Za-z0-9]+
tries to match some more alphanumerics. And the group gets repeated as many times as necessary.
Upvotes: 10
Reputation: 13924
Try this regular expression:
^[a-zA-Z0-9]+([ \t-]?[a-zA-Z0-9]+)*$
Upvotes: 1