Regular Expression for Japanese characters

Question

I am doing internationalization in Struts. I want to write Javascript validation for Japanese and English users. I know regular expression for English but not for Japanese u

Answer 1

Here is a regular expression that can be used to match all English alphanumeric characters, Japanese katakana, hiragana, multibytes of alphanumerics (hankaku and zenkaku), and dashes:

/[一-龠]+|[ぁ-ゔ]+|[ァ-ヴー]+|[a-zA-Z0-9]+|[ａ-ｚＡ-Ｚ０-９]+|[々〆〤]+/u

You can edit it to fit your needs, but notice the "u" flag at the end.

I hope this helps!

Answer 2

As long as you save your scripts in the same character set as your page (e.g. both HTML and JavaScript are UTF-8 or both HTML and JavaScript are Shift_JIS), you should be able to treat your regular expressions exactly the same as you would with English.

function isKansai(city) {
    var rxKansai = /(大阪|兵庫|京都|滋賀|奈良|和歌山|osaka|hyo{1,2}go|kyoto|shiga|nara|wakayama)/i;
    return rxKansai.test(city);
}
isKansai('東京'); // false
isKansai('大阪'); // true
isKansai('Tokyo'); // false
isKansai('Osaka') // true

Answer 3

Provided your text editor and programming language support Unicode, you should be able to enter Japanese characters as literal strings. Things like [A-X] ranges will probably not translate very well in general.

What kind of text are you trying to validate?

What language are the regular experssions in? Perl-compatible, POSIX, or something else?