When you have done that you will know that a negated character class like [^a-zA-Z\d.:] is what you are after. But read the documentation first.

As a (IMHO extremely interesting) side note re \d, the latter may match way much more than one could naively expect, depending on locale: for more info please read

In reply to Re^2: regex to detect any non digit and number by blazar
in thread regex to detect any non digit and number by Anonymous Monk

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