Regular expression for special characters in C #

Question

I have country names that contain some special characters.

• CONGO, DEM. REP. OF
• COTE DIVOIRE
• GUINEA-BISAU
• KOREA, REPUBLIC (SOUTH)

So, I wrote a regular expression to confirm the name of the country, which should not contain any numeric and special characters, except,. ' - ( )

I wrote below regex

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

but it just does nothing. Can someone please let me know what I'm doing wrong.

Answer 1

If you plan to allow curly apostrophes as well, just add it to the character class:

 @"^[a-zA-Z'\-'()/.,\s]+$" ^ 

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

 @"(?i)^[a-z''()/.,\s-]+$" 

WITH#:

 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 ' to character list

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

Answer 3

Try this template:

 ^[a-zA-Z\-–''()\/.,\s]+$ 

Demo