Regex to include alphanumeric and _

Question

I\'m trying to create a regular expression to match alphanumeric characters and the underscore _. This is my regex: \"\\w_*[^-$\\s\\]\" and my impressi

Answer 1

Yes, you are semi-correct if the closing bracket was not escaped and you edited your regex a bit. Also the token \w matches underscore, so you do not need to repeat this character. Your regular expression says:

\w         # word characters (a-z, A-Z, 0-9, _)
_*         # '_' (0 or more times)
[^-$\s]    # any character except: '-', '$', whitespace (\n, \r, \t, \f, and " ")

You could simply write your entire regex as follows to match word characters:

\w+        # word characters ( a-z, A-Z, 0-9, _ ) (1 or more times)

If you want to match an entire string, be sure to anchor your expression.

^\w+$

Explanation:

^          # the beginning of the string
 \w+       #   word characters ( a-z, A-Z, 0-9, _ ) (1 or more times)
$          # before an optional \n, and the end of the string