Regular expression help

[nking]

I need help writing a regular expression to return true if the string contains any number of alpha-numerical characters(upper and lower case), spaces, and/or hyphens, but must have at least one alpha numerical character.

Thanks,
Nathan

[LordShryku]

just search the forums for eregi or ereg or preg_match or preg_replace

[nking]

Originally posted by LordShryku
just search the forums for eregi or ereg or preg_match or preg_replace

I did that, but I couldn't find anything. Can anybody help?

[seanlyon]

$body = 'hello world_11-2003';

preg_match("/[a-zA-Z0-9-_\s]+/i", $body, $result);

if($result[0])
echo $result[0];
else
echo "no";

[pyro]

Originally posted by seanlyon
preg_match("/[a-zA-Z0-9-_\s]+/i", $body, $result);

I didn't test that, but I highly doubt it works as desired. There are a few reasons for my saying this:

1) There is no ^ at the beginning and $ at the end to tell it to match from the beginning of the string to the end.

2) a - in the middle of a character class (between the [ and the ]) mean it is metacharacter (specifically a class range). You will want to either put a backslash in front of it, or put it at the beginning or end of your character class (as then it will be interpreted literally).

3) \s matches all spaces, including \t (tab), \n (new line), and \r (carriage return). This may or may not be a big deal, but since they asked about spaces specifically, I thought I'd mention it.

Try this one (which matches exactly as you asked, assuming that spaces means spaces and not things such as tabs, etc):

/^[-\w ]+$/i

If you want to be positive it contains at least one alphanumeric character (the above will allow that character to be a -, _ or space, the easiest way would be to just run it through another regexp...