Amending pattern to include certain special characters?

[cranjled]

I have been using the pattern ~\W+~ to remove all alphanumerics from a given string, as in:

$arg = preg_replace('~\W+~', '', $arg);

I would like to amend this so that it could be used to validate a couple of inputs that will accept arbitrary database username and password credentials.

Is there an elegant pattern that will allow the various special characters that might appear in a database username/password combo?

Thanks!

Cranjled

[jazzer01]

How about using ^ as a negate character?

so, your function would look like:

$arg = preg_replace('[^_\-\w]', '', $arg); # Would replace any caracter except  _ - and alphanumerics with nothing.

Just add special characters as you require them to the class

[cranjled]

How about using ^ as a negate character...Would replace any caracter except _ - and alphanumerics with nothing.

That's what my original snip already does... I want to support alphanumerics as well as special characters.

[jazzer01]

Well, what caracters do you want to support?
For example

$arg = preg_replace('[^&#%$_\-\w]', '', $arg);

will support &,#,%,$,_,-, as well as alphas - all you need to do is add whatever characters you need to support into that regex

[cranjled]

Thanks for your continued support.

The goal is to allow certain special characters that a person might use in a username/password pair, so the pattern you've demonstrated is pretty close, if not exactly, what it should achieve.

Thanks!

[jazzer01]

No problem - hopefully you should be able to adapt that regex for whatever characters you want to use - like I said, I don't know what you want your restrictions on characters to be - but you do!

Let me know if you need any more help