How to validate a Regular Expression?

Question

I'm developing an application in .NET where the user can provide Regular Expressions that are afterwards used to validate input data.

I need a way to know if a regular expression is actually valid for the .net regex engine.

Thanks for any help

Answer 1

Just try to compile the given regex. You can do that by creating the Regex object and passing the pattern to it. Here's a sample code:

public static bool IsRegexPatternValid(String pattern)
{
    try
    {
        new Regex(pattern);
        return true;
    }
    catch { }
    return false;
}