How do I check if a string only contains alphanumeric characters and dashes?

Question

The string I'm testing can be matched with `[\w-]+`. Can I test if a string conforms to this in Python, instead of having a list of the disallowed characters and testing for that?

Accepted Answer

If you want to test a string against a regular expression, use the re library

```
import re
valid = re.match('^[\w-]+$', str) is not None
```

How do I check if a string only contains alphanumeric characters and dashes?

Solution

Problem