Question

I want to enable my users to specify the allowed characters in a given string.

So… Regex’s are great but too tough for my users.

my plan is to enable users to specify a list of allowed characters – for example

a-z|A-Z|0-9|,

i can transform this into a regex which does the matching as such:

[a-zA-Z0-9,]*

However i’m a little lost to deal with all the escaping – imagine if a user specified

a-z|A-Z|0-9| |,|||\|*|[|]|{|}|(|)

Clearly one option is to deal with every case individually but before i write such a nasty solution – is there some nifty way to do this?

Thanks

David

Answer 1

Forget regex, here is a much simpler solution:

bool isInputValid = inputString.All(c => allowedChars.Contains(c));