What is the regular expression to allow uppercase lowercase alphabetical characters periods spaces and dashes only

Question

I am having problems creating a regex validator that checks to make sure the input has uppercase or lowercase alphabetical characters  spaces  periods  underscores  and dashes only   Couldn t find this example online via searches  For example   These are ok   Dr  Marshall sam smith  george con-stanza  great peter  josh stinson smith   gorne   Anything containing other characters is not okay  That is numbers  or any other symbols

User · Answer

Check out the basics of regular expressions in a tutorial. All it requires is two anchors and a repeated character class:

^[a-zA-Z ._-]*$

If you use the case-insensitive modifier, you can shorten this to

^[a-z ._-]*$

Note that the space is significant (it is just a character like any other).

User · Answer

The regex you re looking for is   A-Za-z  s -        asserts that the regular expression must match at the beginning of the subject    is a character class - any character that matches inside this expression is allowed A-Z allows a range of uppercase characters a-z allows a range of lowercase characters   matches a period rather than a range of characters  s matches whitespace  spaces and tabs    matches an underscore - matches a dash  hyphen   we have it as the last character in the character class so it doesn t get interpreted as being part of a character range  We could also escape it   -  instead and put it anywhere in the character class  but that s less clear   asserts that the preceding expression  in our case  the character class  must match one or more times   Finally  this asserts that we re now at the end of the subject   When you re testing regular expressions  you ll likely find a tool like regexpal helpful  This allows you to see your regular expression match  or fail to match  your sample data in real time as you write it

[regex] What is the regular expression to allow uppercase/lowercase (alphabetical characters), periods, spaces and dashes only?

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