Regex Rookie- Match other than indicated

[Afammy]

I'm studying regex and I think this should work, but alteryx is telling me the match is 'False'. I'm trying to match any rows that contains non alpha, non digit, non ".", non "%", non "/"- in other words- these are ok but want to remove all else (I'll do the parse function after I can find and validate through match). 

[^A-Za-z0-9\.\%\/*]

Shouldn't this work? Thanks ahead of time.

[Philip]

Can you provide the test data set?

[jgo]

The asterisk at the end might be throwing something off... escape it if you're actually telling it to also look for that character since it's used as a specifier, but I think the reason why it's not finding a match is because that expression is only looking for a 1 character value. You need to create an expression that would evaluate the entire value. Using your expression and adding ".*" to the start and end, this is now saying that between any amount of characters that may or may not exist, look for anything that is NOT <your expression>.

.*[^A-Za-z0-9\.\%\/*].*

Also, a simplified expression would be 

.*[^\w\.\%\/].*

---

[Afammy]

Doesn't seem to work as it provides all True if I add wildcard only to beginning and all False if add to both beginning and end. Not every line of my text meets the criteria. I'm surprised there's not a regex tool created that will act as a wizard to help build the regex- "remove: .,%" etc. 

Thanks for the help- much appreciated. 

[Afammy]

Philip, I'd like to share the actual dataset, but it's considered confidential. I know that makes this harder for those of you trying to help. Essentially, how would I strip out or replace the # symbol from this string without specifically calling out the # since I don't know what other characters may exist in the file that I may want to remove? Hope this helps. 

Aaaaa bbbbb123, a2%#Aaaaa bbbbb123, a2%

[jgo · Accepted solution]

@Afammy,

Take a look at the attached workflow, specifically on the Formula tool.

Two examples to see if you want to simply be told if there's a match and another that replaces matched characters with nothing.

[Afammy]

Thanks Jgo.