Regex, every non-alphanumeric character except white space or colon

If you want to treat accented latin characters (eg. à Ñ) as normal letters (ie. avoid matching them too), you'll also need to include the appropriate Unicode range (\u00C0-\u00FF) in your regex, so it would look like this:

/[^a-zA-Z\d\s:\u00C0-\u00FF]/g
  • ^ negates what follows
  • a-zA-Z matches upper and lower case letters
  • \d matches digits
  • \s matches white space (if you only want to match spaces, replace this with a space)
  • : matches a colon
  • \u00C0-\u00FF matches the Unicode range for accented latin characters.

nb. Unicode range matching might not work for all regex engines, but the above certainly works in Javascript (as seen in this pen on Codepen).

nb2. If you're not bothered about matching underscores, you could replace a-zA-Z\d with \w, which matches letters, digits, and underscores.


[^a-zA-Z\d\s:]
  • \d - numeric class
  • \s - whitespace
  • a-zA-Z - matches all the letters
  • ^ - negates them all - so you get - non numeric chars, non spaces and non colons

This should do it:

[^a-zA-Z\d\s:]

Try this:

[^a-zA-Z0-9 :]

JavaScript example:

"!@#$%* ABC def:123".replace(/[^a-zA-Z0-9 :]/g, ".")

See a online example:

http://jsfiddle.net/vhMy8/

Tags:

Regex

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