R regex match things other than known characters - r

Question

For a text field, I would like to expose those that contain invalid characters. The list of invalid characters is unknown; I only know the list of accepted ones.
For example for French language, the accepted list is
A-z, 1-9, [punc::], space, àéèçè, hyphen, etc.
The list of invalid charactersis unknown, yet I want anything unusual to resurface, for example, I would want
This is an 2-piece à-la-carte dessert to pass when
'Ã this Øs an apple' pumps up as an anomalie
The 'not contain' notion in R does not behave as I would like, for example
grep("[^(abc)]",c("abcdef", "defabc", "apple") )
(those that does not contain 'abc') match all three while
grep("(abc)",c("abcdef", "defabc", "apple") )
behaves correctly and match only the first two. Am I missing something
How can we do that in R ? Also, how can we put hypen together in the list of accepted characters ?

Answer 1

[a-z1-9[:punct:] àâæçéèêëîïôœùûüÿ-]+
The above regex matches any of the following (one or more times). Note that the parameter ignore.case=T used in the code below allows the following to also match uppercase variants of the letters.
a-z Any lowercase ASCII letter
1-9 Any digit in the range from 1 to 9 (excludes 0)
[:punct:] Any punctuation character
The space character
àâæçéèêëîïôœùûüÿ Any valid French character with a diacritic mark
- The hyphen character
See code in use here
x <- c("This is an 2-piece à-la-carte dessert", "Ã this Øs an apple")
gsub("[a-z1-9[:punct:] àâæçéèêëîïôœùûüÿ-]+", "", x, ignore.case=T)
The code above replaces all valid characters with nothing. The result is all invalid characters that exist in the string. The following is the output:
[1] "" "ÃØ"

Answer 2

If by "expose the invalid characters" you mean delete the "accepted" ones, then a regex character class should be helpful. From the ?regex help page we can see that a hyphen is already part of the punctuation character vector;
[:punct:]
Punctuation characters:
! " # $ % & ' ( ) * + , - . / : ; < = > ? # [ \ ] ^ _ ` { | } ~
So the code could be:
x <- 'Ã this Øs an apple'
gsub("[A-z1-9[:punct:] àéèçè]+", "", x)
#[1] "ÃØ"
Note that regex has a predefined, locale-specific "[:alpha:]" named character class that would probably be both safer and more compact than the expression "[A-zàéèçè]" especially since the post from ctwheels suggests that you missed a few. The ?regex page indicates that "[0-9A-Za-z]" might be both locale- and encoding-specific.
If by "expose" you instead meant "identify the postion within the string" then you could use the negation operator "^" within the character class formalism and apply gregexpr:
gregexpr("[^A-z1-9[:punct:] àéèçè]+", x)
[[1]]
[1] 1 8
attr(,"match.length")
[1] 1 1