Remove special characters from a string except whitespace

Question

I am looking for a regular expression to remove all special characters from a string, except whitespace. And maybe replace all multi- whitespaces with a single whitespace.

For example "[one@ !two three-four]" should become "one two three-four"

I tried using str = Regex.Replace(strTemp, "^[-_,A-Za-z0-9]$", "").Trim() but it does not work. I also tried few more but they either get rid of the whitespace or do not replace all the special characters.

Solution

[ ](?=[ ])|[^-_,A-Za-z0-9 ]+

Try this.See demo.Replace by empty string.See demo.

http://regex101.com/r/lZ5mN8/69

Comments

[Coding Duchess]

Thanks! It does not take care of extra spaces but works fine otherwise

[vks]

@ElenaDBA try now.took care of multiple spcaes.

[Coding Duchess]

That's great! Thanks!