Question

I am trying to adapt a php application to handle non-latin scripts (specifically: Japanese, simplified Chinese and Arabic). The app’s data validation routines make frequent use of regular expressions to check input, but I am not sure how to adapt the \w character type to other languages without installing additional locales on the system (which I cannot rely on).

Previous developers to have worked on the app have simply added needed characters to the regexes as the number of languages we supported grew (you frequently see “[\wÀÁÂÃÄÅÆÇÈÉ… etc” in the code), but I can’t really do this for all the alphabets I need to support now.

Does anybody out there have some advice on how to tackle this?

Answer 1

See this comment on php.net: http://www.php.net/manual/en/regexp.reference.unicode.php#102756

for example:

//$string may only contain arabic letters
preg_match('@^\p{Arabic}+$@u',$string);

//$string may only contain cyrillic letters
preg_match('@^\p{Cyrillic}+$@u',$string);

//$string may contain word-characters and greek
preg_match('@^[\p{Greek}\w]+$@u',$str);

…and so on

demonstration: http://cecb.freephptest.com/