jQuery: Check if special characters exists in string

Question

I know this question is asked more often here on Stack, but I can\'t seem to get a straight answer out of the questions already posted.

I need to check if all specia

Answer 1

You could also use the whitelist method -

var str = $('#Search').val();
var regex = /[^\w\s]/gi;

if(regex.test(str) == true) {
    alert('Your search string contains illegal characters.');
}

The regex in this example is digits, word characters, underscores (\w) and whitespace (\s). The caret (^) indicates that we are to look for everything that is not in our regex, so look for things that are not word characters, underscores, digits and whitespace.