How to match with regex all special chars except “

Question

How can I match all the “special” chars (like +_*&^%$#@!~) except the char - in PHP?

I know that \W will match all the “special” chars including the -.

Any suggestions in consideration of Unicode letters?

Answer 1

You can try this pattern

([^a-zA-Z-])

This should match all characters that are not a-z and the -

Answer 2

• [^-] is not the special character you want
• [\W] are all special characters as you know
• [^\w] are all special characters as well - sounds fair?

So therefore [^\w-] is the combination of both: All "special" characters but without -.

Answer 3

• \pL matches any character with the Unicode Letter character property, which is a major general category group; that is, it matches [\p{Ll}\p{Lt}\p{Lu}\p{Lm}\p{Lo}].
• \pN matches any character with the Unicode Number character property, which is a major general category group; that is, it matches [\p{Nd}\p{Nl}\p{No}].
• Note that the Unicode Alphabetic characterproperty also includes certain combining marks such as U+0345 ◌ͅ ᴄᴏᴍʙɪɴɪɴɢ ɢʀᴇᴇᴋ ʏᴘᴏɢᴇɢʀᴀᴍᴍᴇɴɪ. I suggest you that you also include \pM, which matches any character with the Unicode Mark character property, which is a major general category group; that is, it matches [\p{Mn}\p{Me}\p{Mc}].
• Character U+002D ʜʏᴘʜᴇɴ-ᴍɪɴᴜꜱ is probably the - you’re referring to.
• Note though that Unicode v6.1 has 27 characters with the Unicode Dash character property, including such common characters as U+2010 ʜʏᴘʜᴇɴ, U+2013 ᴇɴ ᴅᴀꜱʜ, U+2014 ᴇᴍ ᴅᴀꜱʜ, and U+2212 ᴍɪɴᴜꜱ ꜱɪɢɴ. Whether you actually want to include or exclude those, I have no idea.

Given all that, it is not unlikely that you want something like:

[^\pL\pN\pM\x2D\x{2010}-\x{2015}\x{2212}]