Question

I am validating a street address with the following function which works fine for all English letters. But it does not accept these letters ö, Ö, ä, Ä. How can I change the following function so that it accepts these letters too?

validateAddress = function (val) {
        var streetRegex = /^[\w+\s]+\d+,\s*[\s\w]+$/;
        if (streetRegex.test(val)) return true;
        else return false;
    }

Answer 1

Modern browsers should be able to handle those characters in the regex. Check out this example on Chrome or Firefox.

var str = 'öabÖcdäefgÄh';
console.log( str.match(/[öä]/gi) ); //=> ["ö", "Ö", "ä", "Ä"]

But you can always convert those chars to ascii or unicode and use that instead:

function toAscii( str ) {
  return str.replace(/./g, function( char ) {
    return '\\x'+ char.charCodeAt(0).toString(16).toUpperCase();
  });
}

// Use RegExp constructor
var regex = new RegExp('...'+ toAscii('ä') +'...');