PHP find words which are not in regex

I have written following regular expression /^[A-Za-z0-9-_\s]*$/ in PHP which allows numbers, letters, spaces, hyphen a开发者_JS百科nd underscore. I want to display those matches which are not valid against the regex i.e "My Name is Blahblah!!!" should give me "!!!" output.

Use the caret symbol inside the character class to invert the match and remove the start (^) and end ($) characters:

/[^A-Za-z0-9-_\s]+/

http://php-regex.blogspot.com/2008/01/how-to-negate-character-class.html

If you replace all the matches with the empty string then you'll get the non-matching parts back:

preg_replace('/[A-Za-z0-9-_\s]+/', '', $string)

This will work for any arbitrary regex, but for your specific regex @Andy's solution is simpler.

Notice that I removed the anchors ^ and $ to make this work.

preg_replace("/^[A-Za-z0-9-_\s]*$/","","My Name is Blahblah!!!") // Output: "!!!"

Or, if you want all the groupings of them

preg_split("/^[A-Za-z0-9-_\s]*$/","","My Name is Blahblah!!!")

You have to put the hiphen - at the begining or at the end of the character class or escape it, so your regex would be :

/[^-A-Za-z0-9_\s]+/

or

/[^A-Za-z0-9_\s-]+/

or

/[^A-Za-z0-9\-_\s]+/