Question

I wrote an open source project in PHP and as an exercise I’m creating an Objective-C port to run as a desktop app in OSX.

I’m stumped trying to convert the following regular expression from PHP to Objective-C. The problem is that I don’t even know what class to even use. I’ve attempted to use NSRange and NSRegularExpression without much success.

Here’s my PHP code:

$pattern = '/' .
           '([\p{Han}]+)' .          // One or more kanji
           '（([\p{Hiragana}]*)）' . // Hiragana between japanese style parentheses
           '/u';

return preg_filter($pattern, '<ruby><rb>$1</rb><rp>(</rp><rt>$2</rt><rp>)</rp></ruby>', $this->_text);  

This should turn this:

林（はやし）さんは英語（えいご）は話（はな）せます。

into this:

<ruby><rb>林</rb><rp>(</rp><rt>はやし</rt><rp>)</rp></ruby>さんは<ruby><rb>英語</rb><rp>(</rp><rt>えいご</rt><rp>)</rp></ruby>は<ruby><rb>話</rb><rp>(</rp><rt>はな</rt><rp>)</rp></ruby>せます。

---

EDIT:

I’ve tried some string replacing examples in the Apple Docs but the part that I can never get right is the actual regex pattern. I don’t know how to represent the \p{Han} and \p{Hiragana} subsets in Objective-C.

NSError *error = NULL;
NSRegularExpression *regex = 
    [NSRegularExpression regularExpressionWithPattern:@"some pattern here"
    options:NSRegularExpressionCaseInsensitive
      error:&error];

Answer 1

This is usually when I kick myself in the head…

As it turns out, Objective-C DOES accept \p{Han}, except that I had to escape the backslash otherwise it wasn’t recognizing it!