Checking if a string contains any special characters in swift while allowing all languages

Question

I saw a similar post to this but none of the answers there helped me. I am looking to check if a string does not contain any special characters using swift regular expressions. I want to allow other iPhone keyboard letters though like Chinese, Hindi, Arabic, Korean, etc.. I only do not want to allow special characters like +, &, #, $, % though.

I have tried using:

func usernameTest(testStr:String) -> Bool {

        return testStr.range(of: "^[ !\"#$%&'()*+,-./:;<=>?@\\[\\\\\\]^_`{|}~]+", options: .regularExpression) != nil
    }

This did not work though. I thought it would check to see if any special characters were used, but when I tested phrases like "Tom@@@." and "%Will!!" it returned false. I would have expected this to return true since the strings that I passed in contained one or more of the special characters in the range.

Any help would be appreciated as we want our users to be able to create their usernames in any language but we still do not want to allow spaces or special characters.

It is unclear if `Tom@@@` should be a valid username or not – Leo Dabus Feb 14 '20 at 04:34 — Leo Dabus, Feb 14 '20 at 04:34

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Feb 14 '20 at 04:18

you can try this way

var charSet = CharacterSet.init(charactersIn: "@#$%+_)(")
    var string2 = "test@3"

    if let strvalue = string2.rangeOfCharacter(from: charSet)
    {
        print("true")
    }

in the characterset init you can give the special characters which you want to check the occurance.

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 14 '20 at 05:36

1

You must remove character "^" in the regex. So your function should look like this:

func usernameTest(testStr:String) -> Bool {
return testStr.range(of: "[ !\"#$%&'()*+,-./:;<=>?@\\[\\\\\\]^_`{|}~]+", options: .regularExpression) != nil }

answered Feb 14 '20 at 05:36

jguillen

180
1
9

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Feb 14 '20 at 06:03

func usernameTest(testStr:String) -> Bool {
     let letters = CharacterSet.punctuationCharacters
     let range = testStr.rangeOfCharacter(from: letters)
     // range will be nil if no letters is found
     if range != nil {
        return true
     }
     else {
        return false
     }
}

try this one

Checking if a string contains any special characters in swift while allowing all languages

3 Answers3