Regular Expression Help

Hi folks. I'm having a little bit of a stupid moment with a regular expression which I'm hoping someone can lend a hand with. The regular expression I have right now matches strings between 2 and 1000 characters in length that start with one of the following characters: a-z A-Z 0-9 ( ) and where the rest of the string may be made up of the following characters: a-z A-Z 0-9 ( ) _ , . - ' " Here's the working regular expresssion: /^[a-zA-Z0-9\(\)]{1}[ a-zA-Z0-9\(\)_\,\.\-\'\"]{1,999}$/ Now, I'm trying to add \ to the valid characters but when I add a slash after \" I get the following error: Warning: Compilation failed: missing terminating ] for character class at offset 54 in /u0/vservers/*****/html/classes/forms/forms_validation_functions.class.p hp on line 184 So I escape the \ with another \, and I still get the error. Three or four \ results in the \ character being stripped from the string that is being tested with the regular expression. Five \ results in the orignal error which I get with just one \. Can anyone give any advice as to why this is happening? Cheers and TIA. Pablo /^[a-zA-Z0-9\(\)]{1}[ a-zA-Z0-9\(\)_\,\.\-\'\"]{1,999}$/