Regex to validate password strength
You can do these checks using positive look ahead assertions:
^(?=.*[A-Z].*[A-Z])(?=.*[!@#$&*])(?=.*[0-9].*[0-9])(?=.*[a-z].*[a-z].*[a-z]).{8}$
Rubular link
Explanation:
^ Start anchor
(?=.*[A-Z].*[A-Z]) Ensure string has two uppercase letters.
(?=.*[!@#$&*]) Ensure string has one special case letter.
(?=.*[0-9].*[0-9]) Ensure string has two digits.
(?=.*[a-z].*[a-z].*[a-z]) Ensure string has three lowercase letters.
.{8} Ensure string is of length 8.
$ End anchor.
You should also consider changing some of your rules to:
- Add more special characters i.e. %, ^, (, ), -, _, +, and period. I'm adding all the special characters that you missed above the number signs in US keyboards. Escape the ones regex uses.
- Make the password 8 or more characters. Not just a static number 8.
With the above improvements, and for more flexibility and readability, I would modify the regex to.
^(?=(.*[a-z]){3,})(?=(.*[A-Z]){2,})(?=(.*[0-9]){2,})(?=(.*[!@#$%^&*()\-__+.]){1,}).{8,}$
Basic Explanation
(?=(.*RULE){MIN_OCCURANCES,})
Each rule block is shown by (?=(){}). The rule and number of occurrences can then be easily specified and tested separately, before getting combined
Detailed Explanation
^ start anchor
(?=(.*[a-z]){3,}) lowercase letters. {3,} indicates that you want 3 of this group
(?=(.*[A-Z]){2,}) uppercase letters. {2,} indicates that you want 2 of this group
(?=(.*[0-9]){2,}) numbers. {2,} indicates that you want 2 of this group
(?=(.*[!@#$%^&*()\-__+.]){1,}) all the special characters in the [] fields. The ones used by regex are escaped by using the \ or the character itself. {1,} is redundant, but good practice, in case you change that to more than 1 in the future. Also keeps all the groups consistent
{8,} indicates that you want 8 or more
$ end anchor
And lastly, for testing purposes here is a robulink with the above regex
You can use zero-length positive look-aheads to specify each of your constraints separately:
(?=.{8,})(?=.*\p{Lu}.*\p{Lu})(?=.*[!@#$&*])(?=.*[0-9])(?=.*\p{Ll}.*\p{Ll})
If your regex engine doesn't support the \p
notation and pure ASCII is enough, then you can replace \p{Lu}
with [A-Z]
and \p{Ll}
with [a-z]
.