Regular Expression for Password Strength Validation

Question

I have written a regular expression which could potentially be used for password strength validation:

^(?:([A-Z])*([a-z])*(\\d)*(\\W)*){8,12}$

Answer 1

I think you'll have to check each group independently. Pseudo-code:

bool[] array = {};
array[0] = pwd.match(/[A-Z]/);
array[1] = pwd.match(/[a-z]/);
array[2] = pwd.match(/\d/);
array[3] = pwd.match(/[!_.-]/);

int sum = 0;
for (int i=0; i