Remove all exclusive Latin characters using regex

Question

I'm developing a Portuguese software, so many of my entities have names like 'maça' or 'lição' and I want to use the entity as a resource key. So I want keep every character except the 'ç,ã,õ....'

There is some optimum solution using regex? My actual regex is (as Remove characters using Regex suggest):

Regex regex = new Regex(@"[\W_]+");
string cleanText = regex.Replace(messyText, "").ToUpper();

only to emphasize, I'm worried just with Latin characters.

Answer 1

I think the best regex would be to use:

[^\x00-\x80]

This is the negation of all ASCII characters. It matches all non-ASCII characters: The \x00 and \x80 (128) is the hexadecimal character code, and - means range. The ^ inside the [ and ] means negation.

Replace them with the empty string, and you should have what you want. It also frees you from worrying about punctuation, and the like, that are not ASCII, and can cause subtle but annoying (and hard to track down) errors.

If you want to use the extended ASCII set as legal characters, you can say \xFF instead of \x80.