Regular Expression: Allow letters, numbers, and spaces (with at least one letter or number)

Question

I'm currently using this regex ^[A-Z0-9 _]*$ to accept letters, numbers, spaces and underscores. I need to modify it to require at least one number or letter somewhere in the string. Any help would be appreciated!

This would be for validating usernames for my website. I'd actually like to support as many characters as I can, but just want to ensure that I prevent code injection and that characters will display fine for all users. So I'm definitely open to regex validation suggestions that would support a wider set of characters.

Answer 1

You simply need to specify your current RE, followed by a letter/number followed by your current RE again:

^[A-Z0-9 _]*[A-Z0-9][A-Z0-9 _]*$ 

Since you've now stated they're Javascript REs, there's a useful site here where you can test the RE against input data.

If you want lowercase letters as well:

^[A-Za-z0-9 _]*[A-Za-z0-9][A-Za-z0-9 _]*$ 

Answer 2

To go ahead and get a point out there, instead of repeatedly using these:

[A-Za-z0-9 _] [A-Za-z0-9] 

I have two (hopefully better) replacements for those two:

[\w ] [^\W_] 

The first one matches any word character (alphanumeric and _, as well as Unicode) and the space. The second matches anything that isn't a non-word character or an underscore (alphanumeric only, as well as Unicode).

If you don't want Unicode matching, then stick with the other answers. But these just look easier on the eyes (in my opinion). Taking the "preferred" answer as of this writing and using the shorter regexes gives us:

^[\w ]*[^\W_][\w ]*$ 

Perhaps more readable, perhaps less. Certainly shorter. Your choice.

EDIT:

Just as a note, I am assuming Perl-style regexes here. Your regex engine may or may not support things like \w and \W.

EDIT 2:

Tested mine with the JS regex tester that someone linked to and some basic examples worked fine. Didn't do anything extensive, just wanted to make sure that \w and \W worked fine in JS.

EDIT 3:

Having tried to test some Unicode with the JS regex tester site, I've discovered the problem: that page uses ISO instead of Unicode. No wonder my Japanese input didn't match. Oh well, that shouldn't be difficult to fix:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"> 

Or so. I don't know what should be done as far as JavaScript, but I'm sure it's not hard.

Answer 3

^[ _]*[A-Z0-9][A-Z0-9 _]*$

You can optionally have some spaces or underscores up front, then you need one letter or number, and then an arbitrary number of numbers, letters, spaces or underscores after that.

Something that contains only spaces and underscores will fail the [A-Z0-9] portion.