What is the easiest way in C# to validate if a regular expression is well formed?

Question

Is there any simple way in C# to test if a regular expression is a regular expression? In other words, I would like to check if a user-provided regex pattern is malformed or not. This is purely a syntax test and not what the regex is supposed to achieve/test. Thanks

Answer 1

You may try passing it to the Regex constructor and catch potential ArgumentException which is thrown if the argument is a malformed regular expression.

Answer 2

Here's an example from C# Online .NET that uses exceptions:

EDIT:

Removed the code to respect copyright owners, just in case. Simply click on the above link to see it.