[Yujf]

Why not? Common characters are easier to type and presumbly if you are using regex on a unicode string they might include these special characters anyway so what have you gained?

[amelius]

In theory yes, in practice no.

What you have gained is that the regex is now much easier to read.

[LK5ZJwMwgBbHuVI]

> In theory yes, in practice no.

That's like "in theory we need 4 bytes to represent Unicode, but in practice 3 bytes is fine" (glances at universally-maligned utf8mb3)

[knome]

It's easy to read now.