2012/11/13

My favorite regex of all time - good coders code, great reuse

Posted: 12 Nov 2012 02:36 PM PST

I thought I'd share my favorite regex of all time:

  [ -~]

Any ideas what this regexp matches?

It matches all ASCII characters from the space to the tilde. What are those characters? They're all printable characters!

Take a look at the ASCII table. The printable characters start at the space and end at the tilde:

[ -~] matches all printable ascii characters (light blue background)

I love this.

Update:

Would you like to wear this regular expression? I just had an idea to make it a t-shirt as this blog post is getting so popular. Check out this t-shirt that I made:

This shirt is available through Teespring. Teespring is like Kickstarter for t-shirts. If 50 people buy the shirt, everyone gets their shirt. Otherwise no one gets charged and no one gets the shirt.