Apart from the negative character class, there's also negative lookahead: 
(?![;:])\W

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Remember that if you want to add quantifiers (like "*" and "+"), you will have to group this: 
(?:(![;:])\W)+

[download]

I haven't benchmarked it, but I expect the negative charclass as the other people have shown you, is likely faster.

In reply to Re: Exclude some non-word char from Regexp \W by bart
in thread Exclude some non-word char from Regexp \W by zangetsu

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