A regex to match strings with alphanumeric, spaces and punctuation

Question

I need a regular expression to match strings that have letters, numbers, spaces and some simple punctuation (.,!\"\'/$). I have ^[A-Za-z0-9 _]*[A-Za-z0-9

Answer 1

Assuming from your regex that at least one alphanumeric character must be present in the string, then I'd suggest the following:

/^(?=.*[A-Z0-9])[\w.,!"'\/$ ]+$/i

The (?=.*[A-Z0-9]) lookahead checks for the presence of one ASCII letter or digit; the nest character class contains all ASCII alphanumerics including underscore (\w) and the rest of the punctuation characters you mentioned. The slash needs to be escaped because it's also used as a regex delimiter. The /i modifier makes the regex case-insensitive.