How to do regular expressions in vb.net

[alsrory]

So there are many questions and answers here around the subject of regular expressions. The downside is that the vast majority of answers are simply the regular expression...I have also googled - and found hundreds of sites. Trying to wade through everything for a quick-to-understand and implement answer isn't too easy. they are either in a different language - which maybe shouldn't make any difference, though you escape differently in C# to VB and that leads to confusion as to what is an escape character vs a regex switch.The part I am struggling with is understanding them so I can implement some, apparently, simple expressions.My scenario:I have to check every character in a given string, and if the regular expression doesn't allow any of the characters then it should return false.Example:I have tried the following expressions (copy/pasted from various answers here....)\[code\]Dim r As New Regex("^[a-zA-Z0-9 ]*$")\[/code\]also tried\[code\]Dim r As New Regex("[a-zA-Z0-9\s]")\[/code\]also tried\[code\]Dim r as New Regex("^[A-Za-z0-9 ]*")\[/code\]I have been implementing this like:\[code\]Dim r As New Regex(_fontJIAdieuxRegEx) '' where _fontJIAdieuxRegEx is one of the above regex strings.Dim supported = r.IsMatch(fontName)\[/code\]I have been trying to validate something like the following:\[code\]darren\[/code\] should return \[code\]True\[/code\]\[code\]da-rren\[/code\] should return \[code\]False\[/code\] due to the \[code\]-\[/code\] hyphen\[code\]da rren\[/code\] should return \[code\]True\[/code\]Now, simply put, any of these expressions will either return \[code\]True\[/code\] for all of the strings or \[code\]False\[/code\] for all of the strings; so i am clearly doing something wrong.what I would really appreciate is someone pointing out where I am going wrong and also explain a little about the make-up of the regular expression.Once I understand them a little more I need to be able to have different expressions to allow other characters, such as ! @ " ' . etc. So please don't just paste an expression to solve the simple example above.