Wouldn't it be smarter, in that case, match something like [\x20-\x7F] (unsure if that's valid regex, but you get the point), it's more explicit that way, being very obvious about what characters are included, as well as immediately being clear (to me) about the intention of the character class. "0x20 to 0x7F" triggers the idea of "Printable ASCII" a lot sooner than <space> to <tilde>.