How do I create a Perl regex that matches non-alphanumeric characters except spaces?

regex perl unicode character-properties non-alphanumeric
Joe Schmoe picture Joe Schmoe · Oct 20, 2010 · Viewed 16.1k times · Source

I have a Perl regex /\W/i which matches all non-alphanumeric characters, but it also matches spaces which I want to ignore. How do I get it to match non-alphanumeric characters except spaces?

Answer

steinar picture steinar · Oct 20, 2010

You could use 

/[^\w\s]/

This matches all non-word characters (\w) and non-whitespace (\s).

EDIT:

/[^\w ]/

If you want only to ignore spaces (not all whitespace).

UPDATE:

Removed i as it's not needed (see several comments).

Related questions

Is There a Way to Match Any Unicode Alphabetic Character?

I have some documents that went through OCR conversion from PDF into HTML. Because of that, they wound up having lots of random unicode punctuation where the converter messed up (i.e. elipses, etc...). They also correctly have a bunch …

Read More
Does \w match all alphanumeric characters defined in the Unicode standard?

Does Perl's \w match all alphanumeric characters defined in the Unicode standard? For example, will \w match all (say) Chinese and Russian alphanumeric characters? I wrote a simple test script (see below) which suggests that \w does indeed match "as …

Read More
Regex to match any character including new lines

Is there a regex to match "all characters including newlines"? For example, in the regex below, there is no output from $2 because (.+?) doesn't include new lines when matching. $string = "START Curabitur mollis, dolor ut rutrum consequat, arcu nisl ultrices diam, …

Read More