Why does \w match only English words in javascript regex?

Question

I\'m trying to find URLs in some text, using javascript code. The problem is, the regular expression I\'m using uses \\w to match letters and digits inside the URL, but it d

Answer 1

The ECMA 262 v3 standard, which defines the programming language commonly known as JavaScript, stipulates that \w should be equivalent to [a-zA-Z0-9_] and that \d should be equivalent to [0-9]. \s on the other hand matches both ASCII and Unicode whitespace, according to the standard.

JavaScript does not support the \p syntax for matching Unicode things either, so there isn't a good way to do this. You could match all Hebrew characters with:

[\u0590-\u05FF]

This simply matches any code point in the Hebrew block.

You can match any ASCII word character or any Hebrew character with:

[\w\u0590-\u05FF]

Answer 2

Try this \p{L} the unicode regex to Letters

Answer 3

Check this SO Question about JavaScript and Unicode out. Looks like Jan Goyvaerts answer there provides some hope for you.

Edit: But then it seems all browsers don't support \p ... anyway. That question should contain useful info.

Answer 4

Have a look at http://www.regular-expressions.info/refunicode.html.

It looks like there is no \w equivalent for unicode, but you can match single unicode letters, so you can create it.