CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rubyregex
n32303
n32303

Reputation: 829

Regex for capital letters not matching accented characters

I am new to ruby and I'm trying to work with regex.

I have a text which looks something like:

HEADING

Some text which is always non capitalized. Headings are always capitalized,     followed by a space or nothing more.

YOU CAN HAVE MULTIPLE WORDS IN HEADING

I'm using this regular expression to choose all headings:

^[A-Z]{2,}\s?([A-Z]{2,}\s?)*$

However, it matches all headings which does not contain chars as Č, Š, Ž(slovenian characters).

So I'm guessing [A-Z] only matches ASCII characters? How could I get utf8?

Upvotes: 3

Views: 1665

Answers (2)

anubhava
anubhava

Reputation: 785058

You can use unicode upper case letter:

\p{Lu}

Your regex:

\b\p{Lu}{2,}(?:\s*\p{Lu}{2,})\b

RegEx Demo

Upvotes: 3

Neil Slater
Neil Slater

Reputation: 27207

You are right in that when you define the ASCII range A-Z, the match is made literally only for those characters. This is to do with the history of characters on computers, more and more characters have been added over time, and they are not always structured in an encoding in ways that are easy to use.

You could make a larger character class that matches the slovenian characters you need, by listing them.

But there is a shortcut. Someone else has already added necessary data to the Unicode data so that you can write shorter matches for "all uppercase characters": /[[:upper:]]/. See http://ruby-doc.org//core-2.1.4/Regexp.html for more.

Altering your regular expression with just this adjustment:

^[[:upper:]]{2,}\s?([[:upper:]]{2,}\s?)*$

You may need to adjust it further, for instance it would not match the heading "I AM A HEADING" due to the match insisting each word is at least two letters long.

Without seeing all your examples, I would probably simplify the group matching and just allow spaces anywhere:

^[[:upper:]\s]+$

Upvotes: 5

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