Regular expression, How to allow combination of dot (period) and letters?

Question

I want to allow (.) and (a-zA-Z) letters and _ and - , I have some problems with the (.) ,

Any idea ?

Thanks in advance ,

Ish

Answer 1

As everyone already said, if you enclose a set of characters (no need to escape in this situation) in square brackets, you are saying: "please allow these characters I'm putting inside. I found a reference video for you: Skip to 22-23 min

Answer 2

This will do [a-zA-Z_.-]+

Outside the character class, ([]), you need to escape the dot (\.)as it is a meta character.

[a-z]+\.com  #matches `something.com`

Answer 3

[A-Za-z_.-]

is a character class that includes all the characters you mentioned. Inside a character class, it's not necessary to escape the ., and you can avoid escaping the - if you put it first or last.

If numbers are ok, too, you can shorten this to

[\w.-]

Answer 4

. Has a special meaning in regular expressions, it uses to denote any character. Therefore you need to use escape character.

So you need to use \.

Answer 5

This should work just fine:

  [A-z._\-]+

Please be aware that you my have to escape that slash depending on your programming language.

Answer 6

Escape it, as it's a special character:

\.