Use regex for this?

[Denise Hum]

Okay, I'm just returning to Java & programming after a few years hiatus.

I'm trying to see if a string consists of only alphanumeric characters. Is using regular expressions for this appropriate? That is, a String like "555-aws" is bad while "3lsfs" is good.

Here's the code I'm using which doesn't seem to work for more than one character. (I know, the pattern doesn't look for digits yet.) What regular expression should I be using?

String s = "ss";
Pattern p = Pattern.compile("[a-z]");
Matcher m = p.matcher(s);
System.out.println(m.matches());

Thanks.

[Max Habibi]

Hi Denise,

You probably want to add a * to the end of your expression, indicating that it can repeat one or more times. Also, you want to consider upper case characters, and digits. If you're allowed to have underscores, you may want to use the following meta character.
\w \\A word character: [a-zA-Z_0-9]

HTH,
M
[ September 13, 2005: Message edited by: Max Habibi ]

[Denise Hum]

Thanks. I forgot about the *.