G'day bartender1382,

hv wrote: "... most characters do not need escaping in a character class, probably only '-' and ']'.".

See "perlrecharclass: Special Characters Inside a Bracketed Character Class" for a discussion of this.

You have duplicated double-quote in the class ('\"' and later '"') so you can lose one of those. Also note that '-' is special because it indicates a range; however, when it's the last character in the class, there is no range; so no special meaning and no escape required.

haukex suggested transliteration "should be a bit faster". In my experience, it is a lot faster. See "Search and replace or tr" in "Perl Performance and Optimization Techniques". If your line is just by itself, the improvement is unlikely to be noticeable; however, if it occurs in a loop, or a frequently called routine, it could make a big difference: run your own Benchmark to determine this.
[In case you didn't know, y/// and tr/// are synonymous.]

Here a script that shows the various points I made: 

#!/usr/bin/env perl

use strict;
use warnings;

my $str = q{*a%Z(5)-["'] <.?!>};
my $fmt = "%12s : %s\n";

my $op_sub = $str;
$op_sub =~ s/[^a-zA-Z0-9\-\"\'\ \.\?\!"]//g;
printf $fmt, 'OP', $op_sub;

my $no_dup_quote = $str;
$no_dup_quote  =~ s/[^a-zA-Z0-9\-\"\'\ \.\?\!]//g;
printf $fmt, 'NO_DUP_QUOTE', $no_dup_quote;

my $less_esc = $str;
$less_esc =~ s/[^a-zA-Z0-9\-"' .?!]//g;
printf $fmt, 'LESS_ESC', $less_esc;

my $no_esc = $str;
$no_esc =~ s/[^a-zA-Z0-9"' .?!-]//g;
printf $fmt, 'NO_ESC', $no_esc;

my $trans = $str;
$trans =~ y/a-zA-Z0-9"' .?!-//cd;
printf $fmt, 'TRANS', $trans;

[download]

Output:

          OP : aZ5-"' .?!
NO_DUP_QUOTE : aZ5-"' .?!
    LESS_ESC : aZ5-"' .?!
      NO_ESC : aZ5-"' .?!
       TRANS : aZ5-"' .?!

[download]

So, if you choose substitution: s/[^a-zA-Z0-9"' .?!-]//g
if transliteration (would be my choice): y/a-zA-Z0-9"' .?!-//cd

— Ken

In reply to Re: Is there a way to make these two regex lines cleaner? by kcott
in thread Is there a way to make these two regex lines cleaner? by bartender1382

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