How to match hyphens with Regular Expression?

Question

How to rewrite the [a-zA-Z0-9!$* \\t\\r\\n] pattern to match hyphen along with the existing characters ?

Answer 1

The hyphen is usually a normal character in regular expressions. Only if it’s in a character class and between two other characters does it take a special meaning.

Thus:

• [-] matches a hyphen.
• [abc-] matches a, b, c or a hyphen.
• [-abc] matches a, b, c or a hyphen.
• [ab-d] matches a, b, c or d (only here the hyphen denotes a character range).