Remove special characters from a string except whitespace

Question

I am looking for a regular expression to remove all special characters from a string, except whitespace. And maybe replace all multi- whitespaces with a single whitespace.

Answer 1

[ ](?=[ ])|[^-_,A-Za-z0-9 ]+

Try this.See demo.Replace by empty string.See demo.

http://regex101.com/r/lZ5mN8/69

Answer 2

Use the regex [^\w\s] to remove all special characters other than words and white spaces, then replace:

Regex.Replace("[one@ !two three-four]", "[^\w\s]", "").Replace("  ", " ").Trim