Bitt: Thanks, your suggestion works exactly as I want. I have added a few other characters I need matching too so now it looks like this: ^([\w\s,/\-\.\+:@#]|'')+$

nor what you would want it to do
All I am trying to do is clean up some data before it's imported into a Sql database. I have spent (wasted to be truthful) most of the afternoon skimming regex stuff on the web trying to get this done because I was in a hurry. Less haste, more speed is a phrase that comes to mind

The data I am handling uses a pair of ' characters in place of a double quote character, I needed to allow a pair through but not an odd number of them.

Mike: As per your edit that didn't work for me either. Thanks too for your help though.