Invalid regular expression

Question

I am trying to match my pattern with an address on java.

String regex = "[a-zA-Z0-9,\\.\']";
if(!address.matches(regex)) {
  //do something
}

Basically, I'm hoping to detect all special characters except for ,, ., '. With the code above, my address

4700 Keele Street, North York, ON

enters the if condition when it should not. Why is this happening ? Also how do you escape a special character ? Shouldn't it be \$? Eclipse IDE prompts an error stating

"Invalid escape sequence (valid ones are \b \t \n \f \r \” \' \ )"

when I do \$ or \^.

Answer 1

I don't believe you need to escape most characters inside of a set. As already mentioned, you'll want to include a space and capture 1 or more of them with a '+':

String regex = "[a-zA-Z0-9,.' ]+";

Answer 2

Try this.

[a-zA-z0-9,'\\.\s]

You will also want to match spaces. Your expression is not including spaces, thus the address is not matching.