Question

I have a display name field which I have to validate using Ruby regex. We have to match all language characters like French, Arabic, Chinese, German, Spanish in addition to English language characters except special characters like *()!@#$%^&…. I am stuck on how to match those non-Latin characters.

Answer 1

There are two possibilities:

• Create a regex with a negated character class containing every symbol you don’t want to match:

  if ( name ~= /[^*!@%\^]/ ) # add everything and if this matches you are good
  

  This solution may not be feasible, since there is a massive amount of symbols you’d have to insert, even if you were just to include the most common ones.

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• Use Oniguruma (see also: Oniguruma for Ruby main). This supports Unicode and their properties; in which case all letters can be matched using:

  if ( name ~= /[\pL\pM]/ )
  

  You can see what these are all about here: Unicode Regular Expressions