Sometimes special characters are a nuisance. If you are trying to create some user accounts in on-premise or cloud environments, you should avoid special characters in usernames. In this blog post I will show how to find this special characters.

$a contains some names with special characters.

$a = 'Jañinò','Janino','Häns','Jörg'

Then I use a regex statement to retrieve only names with special characters. I also exlclude german umlauts. Note that “Jörg” and “Häns” contain german umlauts. The result should be only ‘Jañinò’.

Foreach ($i in $a) {

If ($i -match '[^a-zA-Z]' -and $i -notmatch '[ö,ü,ä,Ä,Ö,Ü]')
{
Write-Warning "$i"
}
}

Nice one. Mission accomplished.