[Solved] When is RegEx safe and best to use?

Regexes tend to be complex by their nature. But, when well crafted, they are safe. It's just advisable to document them, so other developers can improve and/or update.

The secret is to start regexes small and simple, then going harder as you validate

Emerson Prado I will definitely take heed and try to go stepwise as you said, testing for each condition and see what's captured. I'll just try it for one type, first. Thank you for the advice. Editing in a note for fellow noobmates: positive lookahead (? = ) doesn't capture chars with stated conditions, they do assertions, but I was meaning to say I'll start without them and then add one p. a for each condition slowly. I kind of did it, but I have a problem with the special character one. It accepts only one. Will put it up once I'm done, although I'll say even a simple Regex that I can do looks like alien talk to me once I've stayed 5 min away from it, and it looks as messy as, I'm sorry, but, diarrhea. At least mine does.

Emerson Prado Cool, thank you for clearing this up. So I'm gonna do a password validator with positive lookaheads then and hit back the discussions if I start splitting hairs :D ... I think I'll have a problem, though when I try to implement an expression that matches at least two of 3 or 4 char types... Thank you :-)