Regular expressions

[Anon]

I'm trying to write a function that checks for special characters in a string, and regular expressions are confusing me.

I need a function that returns false if it comes accross anything except alphanumeric characters, and one that returns false for everything except alphanumeric and the characters "()-_." (minus quotes)

Thanks for your help!

[Anon]

// This would return 1 if $what contains only a-z A-Z and 0-9
function check1($what) {
return ereg("^{[a-zA-Z0-9]*$",} $what);
}

To add the extra characters to the "allow" list, replace the above ereg with;

ereg("^{[a-zA-Z0-9().-_]*$",} $what);

[Anon]

Try this pattern:
preg_match("/^{[\W_]+/",$sample)}