Question

I need a regular expression to match against all punctuation marks, such as the standard [,!@#$%^&*()], but including international marks like the upside-down Spanish question mark, Chinese periods, etc. My google-fu is coming up short. Does anyone have such a regular expression on hand that’s compatible with Javascript?

Answer 1

If it’s possible for you to use a plugin, there is a plugin for JavaScript: XRegExp Unicode plugins. That adds support for Unicode categories, scripts, and blocks (I personally have only read about it, I never used it).

With this plugin it should be possible to use Unicode categories like \p{P} as explained at regular-expressions.info.

Update:
OK, I tested it, and it seems to work fine.

You need to get the lib from XRegExp and additionally the Unicode Base and Unicode Category plugins (linked above).

<script src="xregexp.js"></script>
<script src="addons/unicode-base.js"></script>
<script src="addons/unicode-categories.js"></script>
<script>
    var unicodePunctuation = XRegExp("^\\p{P}+$");

    alert(unicodePunctuation.test("?.,;!¡¿。、·")); // true
</script>

The above alerts true. I included some Spanish and Chinese punctuation in my test string, "?.,;!¡¿。、·".