Question

I need a regular expression to validate string with one or more of these characters:

• a-z
• A-Z
• ‘
• àòèéùì
• simple white space

FOR EXAMPLE these string are valide:

D' argon calabrò

maryòn l' Ancol

these string are NOT valide:

hello38239

my_house 

work [tab] with me

I tryed this:

re.match(r”^[a-zA-Z ‘òàèéìù]+$”, string )

It seems to work in my python shell but in Django I get this error:

SyntaxError at /home/

("Non-ASCII character '\\xc3' ...

Why ?

---

Edit:

I have added # –– coding: utf-8 –– at the top of my forms.py but the strings with à,è,ò,ù,é or ì doesn’t match never.

This is my forms.py clean method:

    def clean_title(self):

        if(re.match(r"^[a-zA-Z 'òàèéìù]+$", self.cleaned_data['title'].strip())):
            return self.cleaned_data['title'].strip()               
        raise forms.ValidationError(_("This title is not valid."))

Answer 1

If you user Non-ASCII characters in your python source files you should add proper encoding to the top of your source file like this:

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
utf_string='čćžđšp'

Defining Python Source Code Encodings

This seems to work fine for me:

>>> import re
>>> mystring = "D' argon calabrò"
>>> matched = re.match(r"^([a-zA-Z 'òàèéìù]+)$", mystring)
>>> print matched.groups()
("D' argon calabr\xc3\xb2",)