How do I verify that a string only contains letters, numbers, underscores and dashes?

[Edit] There's another solution not mentioned yet, and it seems to outperform the others given so far in most cases.

Use string.translate to replace all valid characters in the string, and see if we have any invalid ones left over. This is pretty fast as it uses the underlying C function to do the work, with very little python bytecode involved.

Obviously performance isn't everything - going for the most readable solutions is probably the best approach when not in a performance critical codepath, but just to see how the solutions stack up, here's a performance comparison of all the methods proposed so far. check_trans is the one using the string.translate method.

Test code:

import string, re, timeit

pat = re.compile('[\w-]*$')
pat_inv = re.compile ('[^\w-]')
allowed_chars=string.ascii_letters + string.digits + '_-'
allowed_set = set(allowed_chars)
trans_table = string.maketrans('','')

def check_set_diff(s):
    return not set(s) - allowed_set

def check_set_all(s):
    return all(x in allowed_set for x in s)

def check_set_subset(s):
    return set(s).issubset(allowed_set)

def check_re_match(s):
    return pat.match(s)

def check_re_inverse(s): # Search for non-matching character.
    return not pat_inv.search(s)

def check_trans(s):
    return not s.translate(trans_table,allowed_chars)

test_long_almost_valid='a_very_long_string_that_is_mostly_valid_except_for_last_char'*99 + '!'
test_long_valid='a_very_long_string_that_is_completely_valid_' * 99
test_short_valid='short_valid_string'
test_short_invalid='/$%$%&'
test_long_invalid='/$%$%&' * 99
test_empty=''

def main():
    funcs = sorted(f for f in globals() if f.startswith('check_'))
    tests = sorted(f for f in globals() if f.startswith('test_'))
    for test in tests:
        print "Test %-15s (length = %d):" % (test, len(globals()[test]))
        for func in funcs:
            print "  %-20s : %.3f" % (func, 
                   timeit.Timer('%s(%s)' % (f