Please don't do that... little Unicode BABY ANGELs like this one 👼 are dying! ◕◡◕ (← these are not images) (nor is the arrow!)

☺

And you are killing 20 years of DOS :-) (the last smiley is called WHITE SMILING FACE... Now it's at 263A... But in ancient times it was ALT-1)

and his friend

☻

BLACK SMILING FACE... Now it's at 263B... But in ancient times it was ALT-2

Try a negative match:

Pattern regex = Pattern.compile("[^A-Za-z0-9]");

(this will ok only A-Z "standard" letters and "standard" 0-9 digits.)

• Java characters that have to be escaped in regular expressions are:
  \.[]{}()<>*+-=!?^$|
• Two of the closing brackets (] and }) only have to be escaped after opening the same type of bracket.
• In []-brackets some characters (like + and -) do sometimes work without escape.

robert k wild:

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

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

Yes, your expression will match any string that includes at least one of the specified special characters

This worked for me:

String result = str.replaceAll("[^\\dA-Za-z ]", "").replaceAll("\\s+", "+");

For this input string:

/-+!@#$%^&())";:[]{}\ |wetyk 678dfgh

It yielded this result:

+wetyk+678dfgh

You may use \\p{Alnum} to match any kind of letter or digit from any language.

 private static final String ADDRESS_LINE_PATTERN = "[\\p{Alnum},\\s#\\-.]+";

See Pattern javadoc for more info.

Try this.

Pattern regex = Pattern.compile("[$&+,:;=?@#|]");
Matcher matcher = regex.matcher("123=456");
if (matcher.find()){
    // Do something
}

EDIT: matches() checks all the string and find() finds it in any part of the string.

A link: http://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/essential/regex/index.html

Hi @sundhuk, I think you could use a Rule Engine with a rule such as this: NOT $column1$ MATCHES "^[a-zA-Z0-9\^_=\!#\$%&\(\)\*\+\-\.:'/\?@ ]*$" => FALSE TRUE => TRUE Note that I haven’t included comma in this list. You had it both in your allowed and disallowed list but as you’d mentioned it in disallowed, I assume its presence in the first list was a typo. For all the regex characters that have “special meaning”, they have to be escaped with a preceding back-slash \ characters (I hope I got them all!), and the entire list of allowed characters is enclosed in [ ] square brackets. This will also allow empty strings (zero characters). If you don’t want to allow the string to be empty replace the * at the end with a +.