Java RegEx not working as expected

Question

Wondering if someone can tell me why this regular expression doesn't work.

Expression -> ^[A-Za-z0-9$&!#-_?:;\"']+$

The problem is, it's matching against characters not in the set. For example, the word match properly matches and the word match~ does not, but match@ and match! incorrectly match.

I'm using java to match it, and the matching should be fairly straight forward with the code below:

        RE re = new RE(expression);
        return re.match(value);

I know it's probably something ridiculously simple that I'm missing, but if anyone has any thoughts on it, I'd greatly appreciate it!

According to your expression match! is an acceptable value. — user849425
– user849425, Commented Feb 24, 2012 at 16:37
This begs the question 'Why would match pass the test?' According to you m is not in the character class. You seem to understand the syntax of classes. You even seem to know about assertions, quantifiers and such.. — user557597
– user557597, Commented Feb 24, 2012 at 16:52

Dervall · Accepted Answer · 2012-02-24 16:36:36Z

2

I suspect its #-_ that is acting up. Escape the - and see if that helps.

New expression would be ^[A-Za-z0-9$&!#\-_?:;\"']+$

answered Feb 24, 2012 at 16:36

Dervall

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Bruno Silva · Accepted Answer · 2012-02-24 16:37:05Z

1

The problem is the hyphen - in your character set. Your are accepting characters from # to _.

Change it to ^[-A-Za-z0-9$&!#_?:;\"']+$ or escape -.

answered Feb 24, 2012 at 16:37

Bruno Silva

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1 Comment

Cord Awtry Over a year ago

Bruno, this was exactly the problem. Thank you very much.

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