I am using / to test my below regular expression but this expression is allowing < character which is not mentioned in the expression.

['!@#$%*\]\[()-=_+{}:\";?,.\/A-Za-z0-9\s]

I am using https://regex101./ to test my below regular expression but this expression is allowing < character which is not mentioned in the expression.

['!@#$%*\]\[()-=_+{}:\";?,.\/A-Za-z0-9\s]

• javascript
• c#
• regex
• regex-group

• 2 - creates a range, escape it. – ctwheels Commented Feb 1, 2018 at 18:13
• can you please explain.. – Dev Commented Feb 1, 2018 at 18:14
• 1 You either need to put - at the start or end of the set or escape it with \ such that you end up with ['!@#$%*\]\[()\-=_+{}:\";?,.\/A-Za-z0-9\s] – ctwheels Commented Feb 1, 2018 at 18:15
• @ctwheels : Thanks you.. – Dev Commented Feb 1, 2018 at 18:17
• You can also use [!-%'-\/:;=?@[\]{}\w\s] which is shorthand for everything you wrote (but uses ranges to cover characters instead of explicitly writing them all). If you don't want to you use that you can use a slightly shorter version ['!@#$%*\]\[()=+{}:\";?,.\/\w\s-] that replaces A-Za-z0-9_ with \w – ctwheels Commented Feb 1, 2018 at 18:33

1 Answer 1

- denotes a range inside a character class.

The range you're matching in your regex is all the characters that appear between ")" and "=", because:

['!@#$%*\]\[()-=_+{}:\";?,.\/A-Za-z0-9\s]
             ↑ ↑

And the "<" sign appears between them (see here):

You need to:

• escape it, or
• move it to the end (or beginning) of the class

Change to:

['!@#$%*\]\[()=_+{}:\";?,.\/A-Za-z0-9\s-]

Simpler example:

[1-9]

matches digits from "1" to "9", while:

[19-]

and

[1\-9]

matches "1", "9" and "-".