Many thanks to all the Monks who responded to my query.

Apologies for the typo. Not having posted to this site before, I didn't expect to have to post HTML text, and the trailing '/g;' on my regexp got changed to ';' during editing. :^(

Of the solutions offered, defining my own character class is the most attractive. I can define it once in my application framework and make use of it in all user interface modules (about 40 so far).