my $string =~ /[^\d\- ]/;
[download]

Of course, how you actually turn that into a useful regular expression will depend upon the structure of the data to be tested.

For example, if you want to ensure that $string has no characters that you wish to exclude (and is not empty):

if ( $string =~ /^[^\d\- ]+$/ ) {
    # do something here
}
[download]

Cheers,
Ovid

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Actually the first example works fine since there is a possibility that the string is all blank. It works! Thanks,