• \pL matches any character with the Unicode Letter character property, which is a major general category group; that is, it matches [\p{Ll}\p{Lt}\p{Lu}\p{Lm}\p{Lo}].
• \pN matches any character with the Unicode Number character property, which is a major general category group; that is, it matches [\p{Nd}\p{Nl}\p{No}].
• Note that the Unicode Alphabetic characterproperty also includes certain combining marks such as U+0345 ◌ͅ ᴄᴏᴍʙɪɴɪɴɢ ɢʀᴇᴇᴋ ʏᴘᴏɢᴇɢʀᴀᴍᴍᴇɴɪ. I suggest you that you also include \pM, which matches any character with the Unicode Mark character property, which is a major general category group; that is, it matches [\p{Mn}\p{Me}\p{Mc}].
• Character U+002D ʜʏᴘʜᴇɴ-ᴍɪɴᴜꜱ is probably the - you’re referring to.
• Note though that Unicode v6.1 has 27 characters with the Unicode Dash character property, including such common characters as U+2010 ʜʏᴘʜᴇɴ, U+2013 ᴇɴ ᴅᴀꜱʜ, U+2014 ᴇᴍ ᴅᴀꜱʜ, and U+2212 ᴍɪɴᴜꜱ ꜱɪɢɴ. Whether you actually want to include or exclude those, I have no idea.

Given all that, it is not unlikely that you want something like:

[^\pL\pN\pM\x2D\x{2010}-\x{2015}\x{2212}]

Use character classes. A character class beginning with caret will match anything not in the class.

[^,;]

You can use some php filter widget like Purifier (to set a whitelist for input)...

But Still, we would like to suggest you to learn regex!

When you define a negative character class, you are really inverting it.

What does that mean ?

A positive character class implicitly OR's it's contents.

When you negate a class, you implicitly AND it's contents.

So, [\w-] means word OR dash,
the inverse, [^\w-] means not word AND not dash.

A negative word for instance, [^\w] would match a dash -.
So, to not match it, you have to add a not dash as well.

A C analogy would be

existing (varA || varB)
inverted (!varA && !varB)

where inverting changes the Boolean of each of the components.

Basically a negative class changes the Boolean of each of its components,
so the implicit OR becomes an implicit AND and the components characters
(or expressions) are negated.

What will really bake your noodle later on is when you see something like
[^\S\r\n]

This translates to NOT-NOT-Whitespace and NOT-cr and NOT-lf
which reduces to matching all whitespace except CR,LF

To remove the special characters, try

var name = name.replace(/[!@#$%^&*]/g, "");

hi all,

would you say the below is ok to enter in one special character

Regexp('.*[\¬\!\"\£\$\%\^\&\*\(\)\_\+\`\-\=\{\}\:\@\~\<\>\?\[\]\;\'\#\,\.\/\\\|]'

thanks,
rob