Special characters in regex

Question

I have a pattern which looks like this (I'm not the creator):

[a-z,A-z,0-9,\-,\+,\&,\/,\\\,\s]{1,127}

which i pass to Regex.IsMatch() .

Is there a "better" way of writing the same expression? And by better I mean shorter.

And if I would like to add a special character like æ , do I simply add \\æ ?

Answer 1

You can start by removing the duplicates. This includes the repeated commas, as well as the az because this is encapsulated in the Az range, as is the \\ .

You also do not have to escape most characters, and you can pull the - to the front of the character class to avoid escaping that one too.

This leaves you with:

[-+&/,A-z0-9\s]{1,127}