Question

I am porting a Delphi application to C#. In one of the units there is a declaration like this:

const
  IdentChars = ['a'..'z', 'A'..'Z', '_'];

I did not found similar declaration syntax for C#.

This is the best I could come up with:

char[] identFirstChars; // = ['a'..'z', 'A'..'Z', '_'];
int size = (int)'z' - (int)'a' + 1 + (int)'Z' - (int)'A' + 1 + 1; 
identFirstChars = new char[size];
int index = 0;
for(char ch = 'a'; ch <= 'z'; ch = (char)((int)(ch) + 1))
{
    identFirstChars[index] = ch;
    index++;
}
for (char ch = 'A'; ch <= 'Z'; ch = (char)((int)(ch) + 1))
{
    identFirstChars[index] = ch;
    index++;
}
identFirstChars[index] = '_';

There must be a more efficient way.

Answer 1

What about this?

char[] identFirstChars = "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz_".ToCharArray();

Of course, you can generate an array in your code (this probably can be done with much less lines using Enumerable.Range) but I think in your case it doesn’t worth it.