Develop Reference

Password Regex Validation: Preventing Spaces

Okay, so I'm trying to adhere to the following password rule:
Must be 6 to 15 characters, include at least one lowercase letter, one uppercase letter and at least one number. It should also contain no spaces.
Now, for everything but the spaces, I've got:
^(?=.*[a-z])(?=.*[A-Z])(?=.*\d).{6,15}$
Problem is, that allows spaces.
After looking around, I've tried using \s, but that messes up my lowercase and uppercase requirements. I also seen another suggestion to replace the * with a +, but that seemed to break the entire thing.
I've created a REFiddle if you want to have a live test.
To clarify, this is a client requirement unfortunately, I'm never usually this strict with passwords.

How about:
^(?=.*[a-z])(?=.*[A-Z])(?=.*\d)\S{6,15}$
\S stands for any NON space character.

Restrict all the special characters through a regex

There is a long set of characters that are not allowed to validate an input box of winform app.
So i figured that rather than making the long list that are not allowed make the shorter one that are allowed.
The set that is allowed are (a-z,A-Z, 0-9,#,.) .Rest every thing that can be entered are not allowed.
This is the regex that i have made for this.
Regex.IsMatch(textBox1.Text, #"[#\.\w]+$")
It seem to work in some cases but when i enter the data in this format normal character or number special character normal character or number it seems to break few example ee(vv, 55)44,aba&3B.
Not able to figure out whats wrong in this.

Your regex is not valid, because you don't validate all string, but the last part.
You should start it with ^ - beginning of the line symbol.
Regex.IsMatch(textBox1.Text, #"^[\w#.]*$")
\w also means letters in every language, so it will validate the string "абц" too.
So if you need only for english, use
Regex.IsMatch(textBox1.Text, #"^[a-zA-Z0-9#.]*$")

Try this :
Regex.IsMatch(textBox1.Text, #"^[a-zA-Z0-9#.]*$")

Use
^[-a-zA-Z0-9 _ - \. #]*
as the Regex expression text.

Regular expression for DataAnnotation for Password

We have a requirement to make sure password conforms to the specific strength format (this is configured in web.config). Requirements are that password must contain certain number of capital characters and certain number of non-alphanumeric characters. I want to annotate my Password property with regular expression that validates password to make sure password contains x number of CAPS and y number of non-alpha chars. Please help with regular expression.

Checking multiple conditions like this in a single regex is best accomplished using lookaheads, for example say you want 3 capital characters and 4 non-alpha characters, you could use the following regex:
^(?=(?:.*[A-Z]){3})(?=(?:.*[^a-zA-Z]){4})
Explanation: first, lets think about what a regex would look like that only checks the first condition. To match 3 uppercase characters we can use the following:
(?:.*[A-Z]){3}
We can still check this condition by dropping it inside of a lookahead, which is what the (?=...) does, so now (?=(?:.*[A-Z]){3}) checks this condition without consuming any characters. At this point we can check the second condition using (?:.*[^a-zA-Z]){4}. I put this second condition inside of a lookahead as well so that adding more checks is straightforward.
Note that the current regex won't actually match any characters, it will match the beginning of the string (zero characters) if all conditions match, otherwise the match will fail. If you want it to actually consume characters as well, just add .* to the end.

I found a good article that solves it for me
http://www.zorched.net/2009/05/08/password-strength-validation-with-regular-expressions/

.NET Regular expression which check length and non-alphanumeric characters

I need Regexp to validate string has minimum length 6 and it is contains at least one non-alphanumeric character e.g: "eN%{S$u)", "h9YI!>4j", "{9YI!;4j", "eN%{S$usdf)", "dfh9YI!>4j", "ghffg{9YI!;4j".
This one is working well ^.*(?=.{6,})(?=.*\\d).*$" but in cases when string does not contain any numbers(e.g "eN%{S$u)") it is not working.

^(?=.{6})(.*[^0-9a-zA-Z].*)$
We use positive lookahead to assure there are at least 6 characters. Then we match the pattern that looks for at least one non-alphanumeric character ([^0-9a-zA-Z]). The .*'s match any number of any characters around this one non-alphanumeric character, but by the time we've reached here we've already checked that we're matching at least 6.
^.*(?=.{6,})(?=.*\\d).*$"
is the regex you tried. Here are some suggestions:
You don't need to match more than 6 characters in the lookahead. Matching only 6 here does no restrict the rest of the regular expression from matching more than 6.
\d matches a digit, and (?=.*\\d) is a lookahead for one of them. This is why you are experiencing the problems you mentioned with strings like eN%{S$u).
Even if the point above wasn't incorrect and the regular expression here was correct, you can combine the second lookahead with the .* that follows by just using .*\\d.*.

marcog's answer is pretty good, but I'd do it the other way around so that it's easier to add even more conditions (such as having at least one digit or whatever), and I'd use lazy quantifiers because they are cheaper for certain patterns:
^(?=.*?[^0-9a-zA-Z]).{6}
So if you were to add the mentioned additional condition, it would be like this:
^(?=.*?[^0-9a-zA-Z])(?=.*?[0-9]).{6}
As you can see, this pattern is easily extensible. Note that is is designed to be used for checking matches only, its capture is not useful.

Keep it easy.
// long enough and contains something not digit or a-z
x.Length >= 6 && Regex.IsMatch(x, #"[^\da-zA-Z]")
Happy coding.
Edit, pure "regular expression":
This first asserts there are 6 letters of anything in the look-ahead, and then ensures that within the look-ahead there is something that is not alpha-numeric (it will "throw away" up to the first 5 characters trying to match).
(?=.{6}).{0,5}[^\da-zA-Z]

What about that(fixed): ^(?=.{6})(.*[^\w].*)$
Check this out http://www.ultrapico.com/Expresso.htm it is cool tool which could help you a lot in Regexps learning.

How Can I Check If a C# Regular Expression Is Trying to Match 1-(and-only-1)-Character Strings?

Maybe this is a very rare (or even dumb) question, but I do need it in my app.
How can I check if a C# regular expression is trying to match 1-character strings?
That means, I only allow the users to search 1-character strings. If the user is trying to search multi-character strings, an error message will be displaying to the users.
Did I make myself clear?
Thanks.
Peter
P.S.: I saw an answer about calculating the final matched strings' length, but for some unknown reason, the answer is gone.
I thought it for a while, I think calculating the final matched strings length is okay, though it's gonna be kind of slow.
Yet, the original question is very rare and tedious.

a regexp would be .{1}
This will allow any char though. if you only want alpanumeric then you can use [a-z0-9]{1} or shorthand /w{1}
Another option its to limit the number of chars a user can type in an input field. set a maxlength on it.
Yet another option is to save the forms input field to a char and not a string although you may need some handling around this to prevent errors.
Why not use maxlength and save to a char.

You can look for unescaped *, +, {}, ? etc. and count the number of characters (don't forget to flatten the [] as one character).
Basically you have to parse your regex.

Instead of validating the regular expression, which could be complicated, you could apply it only on single characters instead of the whole string.
If this is not possible, you may want to limit the possibilities of regular expression to some certain features. For instance the user can only enter characters to match or characters to exclude. Then you build up the regex in your code.
eg:
ABC matches [ABC]
^ABC matches [^ABC]
A-Z matches [A-Z]
# matches [0-9]
\w matches \w
AB#x-z matches [AB]|[0-9]|[x-z]|\w
which cases do you need to support?
This would be somewhat easy to parse and validate.