How do I get a list of all the printable characters in C#?

Question

I\'d like to be able to get a char array of all the printable characters in C#, does anybody know how to do this?

edit:

By printable I mean

Answer 1

I know ASCII wasn't specifically requested but this is a quick way to get a list of all the printable ASCII characters.

for (Int32 i = 0x20; i <= 0x7e; i++)
{
    printableChars.Add(Convert.ToChar(i));
}

See this ASCII table.

Answer 2

A LINQ solution (based on Fredrik Mörk's):

Enumerable.Range(char.MinValue, char.MaxValue).Select(c => (char)c).Where(
    c => !char.IsControl(c)).ToArray();

Answer 3

This will give you a list with all characters that are not considered control characters:

List<Char> printableChars = new List<char>();
for (int i = char.MinValue; i <= char.MaxValue; i++)
{
    char c = Convert.ToChar(i);
    if (!char.IsControl(c))
    {
        printableChars.Add(c);
    }
}

You may want to investigate the other Char.IsXxxx methods to find a combination that suits your requirements.

Answer 4

Here's a LINQ version of Fredrik's solution. Note that Enumerable.Range yields an IEnumerable<int> so you have to convert to chars first. Cast<char> would have worked in 3.5SP0 I believe, but as of 3.5SP1 you have to do a "proper" conversion:

var chars = Enumerable.Range(0, char.MaxValue+1)
                      .Select(i => (char) i)
                      .Where(c => !char.IsControl(c))
                      .ToArray();

I've created the result as an array as that's what the question asked for - it's not necessarily the best idea though. It depends on the use case.

Note that this also doesn't consider full Unicode characters, only those in the basic multilingual plane. I don't know what it returns for high/low surrogates, but it's worth at least knowing that a single char doesn't really let you represent everything :(

Answer 5

public bool IsPrintableASCII(char c)
{
     return c >= '\x20' && c <= '\x7e';
}