Regular expressions, Unicode style....

Regular expressions and Unicode

Erno de Weerd — Sat, 23 Apr 2005 13:09:25 GMT

re: Regular expressions, Unicode style....

Jonathan — Sat, 23 Apr 2005 14:35:41 GMT

It's כשר לפסח, not קשר לפסח.
כשר = Kosher
קשר = knot, connection

re: Regular expressions, Unicode style....

Michael S. Kaplan — Sat, 23 Apr 2005 15:55:29 GMT

Interesting... looking at food containers I actually see both spellings. :-(

Not sure what to do with that -- good think it's not Passover yet I suppose....

Write better Regular expression using unicode character classes

^(?:[^$]*)$ -- Matches everything, captures nothing — Sat, 23 Apr 2005 18:41:48 GMT

re: Regular expressions, Unicode style....

Svend Tofte — Sun, 24 Apr 2005 05:10:50 GMT

I think the linked authors problem is that he is using JScript, probably some 5.6 version, which doesn't have the (.NET) features, you list here.

Also, I've never really exercised the regex part of .NET, so I'm no expert there, but my copy of "Mastering Regular Expressions" tells me that by default "\w" matches things, such as :Ll, :Lu, and a few others.

I guess they could break backward compatability, when there is no existing code-base, which may (what do I know) have been the problem with the regex part of JScript (or whereever the regex code that JScript uses lives), since suddenly allowing much wider input, may not have flown well with alot of existing websites, relying on \w to mean just [A-Za-z], and no more.

And thanks for a very cool blog btw. I never dabble much in these waters (internationalization, etc), but when I do, it's always scary.

re: Regular expressions, Unicode style....

Michael S. Kaplan — Sun, 24 Apr 2005 05:36:01 GMT

Yep, Scott is indeed looking for a JScript solution, I told him a comment to his post that there may not be an answer there other than hardcoding the desired characters....

Glad you like the blog! :-)

re: Regular expressions, Unicode style....

Travis Illig — Mon, 25 Apr 2005 19:20:42 GMT

JavaScript supports \u0000-\uFFFF style Unicode character expressions, so you could theoretically expand the character classes into the corresponding \uXXXX-\uYYYY style range(s) on the server side to feed to the client.

I've posted a code sample here:
http://www.paraesthesia.com/blog/comments.php?id=809_0_1_0_C

Obviously something you'd want to cache rather than calculate each time, but it's something to think about.