Regex for special characters in c#

Question

I have below country names which contains some special characters.

1. CONGO, DEM. REP. OF THE
2. COTE D’IVOIRE
3. GUINEA–BISSAU
4. KOREA, REPUBLIC OF (SOUTH)

So, I wrote a regular expression to validate that a country name that must not contain any numeric and special characters other than , . ' - ( )

I wrote below regex

string country = "COTE D’IVOIRE"
bool isValid = Regex.IsMatch(country.Trim(), @"^[a-zA-Z\-'()/.,\s]+$");

but it just not doing the thing. Can someone please let me know what I'm doing wrong.

Answer 1

If you plan to also allow curly apostrophe, just add it to the character class:

@"^[a-zA-Z’\-'()/.,\s]+$"
          ^

Note that you do not have to escape - if it is at the end of the character class and you can use (?i) case-insensitive modifier to shorten the a-zA-Z part:

@"(?i)^[a-z’'()/.,\s-]+$"

C#:

string country = "COTE D’IVOIRE";
bool isValid = Regex.IsMatch(country.Trim(), @"(?i)^[a-z’'()/.,\s-]+$");
// or use RegexOptions.IgnoreCase option
//bool isValid = Regex.IsMatch(country.Trim(), @"^[a-z’'()/.,\s-]+$", RegexOptions.IgnoreCase);

Answer 2

Add the ’ to the list of symbols

string country = "COTE D’IVOIRE"
bool isValid = Regex.IsMatch(country.Trim(), @"^[a-zA-Z\-'’()/.,\s]+$");