Exclusion in Regex not working

Hello Everyone This might be slightly offtopic since I'm not sure its php related but.... I'm working on a script where some inputdata is taken for further processing. For validation purposes I want to make sure certain chars are not part of the input. Basically stuff like $ * :; etc... So I'm using ereg(pattern, input) to see if the pattern matches or not. Example if(ereg($pattern, $input)) { // do allowed stuff } else { // do something for the illegal input } SO for exclusion I build the following pattern [^$] and pass it to ereg above. So if the input includes a $ the ereg should return false and the processing shouldn't take place. Well the thing is for $pattern = '[^$]' it doesn't work. Input including '$' is still passed to the allowed stuff code block. So am I doing something wrong or is there a problem with the character coding of my editor BtW I'm using W2K with PHP 4.1.x Apache 1.3.X and TextPad 4.x for editing. I save my scripts as ANSI format. Meaning only legal ASCII Characters + German extended code page. Can anybody help me? I also tried [^a] as a pattern but the input can contain a and slip through.