Regular expression problems

Hi there, I am using a regular expression to try and weed out unwanted characters in user input. What I am trying to do, is allow input to contain alpha-numeric characters and some other standard characters e.g. "-", "!", "&", etc. I am trying to accomplish this like so: else if (eregi("^[a-zA-Z0-9!@#\$%^&\*\(\),/.//<>\?;':\"~`_\+\|\\-\\t\n\ ]*$", $sessname)) return true The problem is that this regular expresion returns FALSE if there is a "-" character anywhere in the input. Anyone offer any pointers? Thanks in advance. - Best regards, Lee