Question

I want to remove all non-alphabetic character from a string. The problem is that I don’t know the letter range because it is UTF8 string.

It can be ENGLISH, ՀԱՅԵՐԵՆ, ქართული, УКРАЇНСЬКИЙ, РУССКИЙ

I usually do something like this:

$str = preg_replace('/[^a-zA-Z]/', '', $str);

or

$str = preg_replace('/[^\w]/u', '', $str);

but they both clear foreign characters.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

UPDATE: As for Unicode, RegExp will look like this [^\p{L}\s]+ (without replacing spaces)

It will replace all non-alpha characters with UTF8 support.

• \P{L}+ – matches any non-letter symbols
• \p{P}+ – removes punctuation only

Here are some reference docs that can be helpful:

• Tutorial on RegExp UTF8
• Unicode character properties