[RESOLVED] Help matching all symbols except defined

[Torrodon]

I need to match all symbols except letters, numbers, "", " ", "-", "&"? I tried the following but it is not working:

preg_match_all ( '/[^a-z0-9_ -&]/i' , $string , $matches );

[bradgrafelman]

The PCRE engine probably thinks you're trying to define a character range since you have two items with a dash between them; try prepending that last dash (which you're meaning to use as a literal hyphen, not a range identifier) with a backslash.

[nrg_alpha]

When listing a - within a character class, you can always put it as either the very first or very last character (in this case, since you have ^ to negate the class, make the - the second or last character). Or escape it otherwise with -

preg_match_all ( '/[^a-z0-9_ &-]/i' , $string , $matches ); 

Otherwise, you are creating a range (as in your version, a range from space to &... clearly not what you want).

Also note that a-z0-9 (case insensitive) can be summed up as \w. Granted, given your locale, \w may also match things like accented characters for example.. so you could ensure a pure a-zA-Z0-9 match like so:

setlocale(LC_CTYPE, 'C');
preg_match_all ( '/[^\w &-]/' , $string , $matches ); 

Edit - Do'h, Brad beat me to it.

[Torrodon]

grrr i totally forgot '-' is special symbol inside [] and i have to escape it
thanks