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 );

    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.

      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.

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

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