regular expression to remove all non alphanumeric characters except punctuation carriage return They can be used with php preg_replace, sed, notepad++, sublimite text, phpstorm, editpad, powershell, emeditor, dreamweaver, bbedit, brief, elvis, grep, java, Openoffice, libreoffice, word, netbeans, note tab, nvi, omnioutliner, pspad, python, qt, regel, regexbuddy, sas, SubEthaEdit, tcc command line, tera term, textmate, TSE, UltraEdit, Vile, Vim, scite and anything else that supports regex (I hope). regular expression that matches all non alphanumeric (from A to Z upper and lowercase. From zero to nine) characters except punctuation and other characters like line feed and carriage return. ,;()[]{}. It does match characters that are not in the english alphabet. [^a-zA-Z0-9\s,;\-_\[\]\{\}()\.\/\\\+&#\"\'] Matching all non alphanumeric. [\W\D\S] I'm not an expert of regular expressions so, please, comment if you find errors.