I want to do validation for a String which can only contains alphanumeric and only one special character. I tried with (\\W).{1,1}(\\w+).
But it is true only when I start with a special character. But I can have one special character at any place in String.
Use the ^ and $ anchors to instruct the regex engine to start matching from the beginning of the string and stop matching at the end of the string, so taking your regex:
^(\\W).{1,1}(\\w+)$
Please take a look at this Oracle (Java) tutorial on regular expressions.
Try this regexp: \w*\W?\w* (Java string: "\\w*\\W?\\w*")
This expression has a drawback of matching zero-length strings. If your input must have exactly one special character, remove the question mark ? from the expression.
use matcher.find() and not matcher.match() and search for \\w and remove plus (+) because it will match all alphanumeric characters sequence in your string.If your string contains only them, your regex will match whole string.
if I understand your regex correctly, this could solve your problem:
([\w]+)([^\w])([\w]+)
