Question

If I do, preg_replace(‘/[^a-zA-Z0-9\s-_]/’,”,$val) in a multi-lingual application, will it handle things like accented characters or russian characters? If not, how can I filter user input to only allow the above characters but with locale awareness?

thanks!

codecowboy.

Answer 1

The only useful information I can find is from this page of the manual, which states :

A “word” character is any letter or
digit or the underscore character,
that is, any character which can be
part of a Perl “word”. The definition
of letters and digits is controlled by
PCRE’s character tables, and may vary
if locale-specific matching is taking
place. For example, in the “fr”
(French) locale, some character codes
greater than 128 are used for accented
letters, and these are matched by \w.

Still, I wouldn’t bet that it’s working as you want…

But, to be sure :

• maybe using unicode matching would be better
• You’ll probably have to try to be certain…

About unicode, the manual says this :

Matching characters by Unicode
property is not fast, because PCRE has
to search a structure that contains
data for over fifteen thousand
characters. That is why the
traditional escape sequences such as
\d and \w do not use Unicode
properties in PCRE.

So, it might be a safer solution… curious about it, should I add ^^