I am trying to come up with a regular expressions that will match against a string allowing regular letters, hyphens, unicode letters, numbers, spaces, newlines (\n or \r\n) but no punctuation of any sort. For the moment I am completely ignoring the new lines.

Additionally ignoring the unicode characters the following works: 

/^[\w\ \-]+$/

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Now adding in the unicode characters the following ought to work according to the docs: 
/^[\w\ \-\X]+$/

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However I actually get the following error: 
Unrecognized escape \X in character class passed through in regex; mar
+ked by <-- HERE in m/^[\w\ \-\X <-- HERE ]+$/ at ./b.pl line 10.

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Now the docs suggest a somewhat more complicated alternative to to \X which does sort of work: 

/^[\w\ \-(?:\P{M}\p{M}+)]+$/

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This works in the sense that it will accept unicode characters, but however it will actually accept just about anything. I have tried ways round this such as using zero width assertions and other possibilities opened up be reading about unicode properties. However everything I have tried either seems to reject unicode or allow everything.

I have encapsulated the behaviour in the following scriptlet: 

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

while(<>) {
        my $line = $_;
        if ($line =~ /^[\w\ \-]+$/) {
                print "STRAIGHT - ";
        }
        if ($line =~ /^[\w\ \-(?:\P{M}\p{M}+)]+$/) {
                print "OKAY\n";
        }
        else {
                print "BLAH!\n";
        }
}

[download]
. My standard example of a unicode word is "księgowość".

When I run "perl -V" I get the following: 

Summary of my perl5 (revision 5 version 10 subversion 0) configuration
+:
  Platform:
    osname=linux, osvers=2.6.26-2-amd64, archname=i486-linux-gnu-threa
+d-multi
    uname='linux puccini 2.6.26-2-amd64 #1 smp fri aug 14 07:12:04 utc
+ 2009 i686 gnulinux '
    config_args='-Dusethreads -Duselargefiles -Dccflags=-DDEBIAN -Dccc
+dlflags=-fPIC -Darchname=i486-linux-gnu -Dprefix=/usr -Dprivlib=/usr/
+share/perl/5.10 -Darchlib=/usr/lib/perl/5.10 -Dvendorprefix=/usr -Dve
+ndorlib=/usr/share/perl5 -Dvendorarch=/usr/lib/perl5 -Dsiteprefix=/us
+r/local -Dsitelib=/usr/local/share/perl/5.10.0 -Dsitearch=/usr/local/
+lib/perl/5.10.0 -Dman1dir=/usr/share/man/man1 -Dman3dir=/usr/share/ma
+n/man3 -Dsiteman1dir=/usr/local/man/man1 -Dsiteman3dir=/usr/local/man
+/man3 -Dman1ext=1 -Dman3ext=3perl -Dpager=/usr/bin/sensible-pager -Ua
+fs -Ud_csh -Ud_ualarm -Uusesfio -Uusenm -DDEBUGGING=-g -Doptimize=-O2
+ -Duseshrplib -Dlibperl=libperl.so.5.10.0 -Dd_dosuid -des'
    hint=recommended, useposix=true, d_sigaction=define
    useithreads=define, usemultiplicity=define
    useperlio=define, d_sfio=undef, uselargefiles=define, usesocks=und
+ef
    use64bitint=undef, use64bitall=undef, uselongdouble=undef
    usemymalloc=n, bincompat5005=undef
  Compiler:
    cc='cc', ccflags ='-D_REENTRANT -D_GNU_SOURCE -DDEBIAN -fno-strict
+-aliasing -pipe -I/usr/local/include -D_LARGEFILE_SOURCE -D_FILE_OFFS
+ET_BITS=64',
    optimize='-O2 -g',
    cppflags='-D_REENTRANT -D_GNU_SOURCE -DDEBIAN -fno-strict-aliasing
+ -pipe -I/usr/local/include'
    ccversion='', gccversion='4.3.2', gccosandvers=''
    intsize=4, longsize=4, ptrsize=4, doublesize=8, byteorder=1234
    d_longlong=define, longlongsize=8, d_longdbl=define, longdblsize=1
+2
    ivtype='long', ivsize=4, nvtype='double', nvsize=8, Off_t='off_t',
+ lseeksize=8
    alignbytes=4, prototype=define
  Linker and Libraries:
    ld='cc', ldflags =' -L/usr/local/lib'
    libpth=/usr/local/lib /lib /usr/lib /usr/lib64
    libs=-lgdbm -lgdbm_compat -ldb -ldl -lm -lpthread -lc -lcrypt
    perllibs=-ldl -lm -lpthread -lc -lcrypt
    libc=/lib/libc-2.7.so, so=so, useshrplib=true, libperl=libperl.so.
+5.10.0
    gnulibc_version='2.7'
  Dynamic Linking:
    dlsrc=dl_dlopen.xs, dlext=so, d_dlsymun=undef, ccdlflags='-Wl,-E'
    cccdlflags='-fPIC', lddlflags='-shared -O2 -g -L/usr/local/lib'


Characteristics of this binary (from libperl):
  Compile-time options: MULTIPLICITY PERL_DONT_CREATE_GVSV
                        PERL_IMPLICIT_CONTEXT PERL_MALLOC_WRAP USE_ITH
+READS
                        USE_LARGE_FILES USE_PERLIO USE_REENTRANT_API
  Built under linux
  Compiled at Aug 28 2009 22:15:29
  @INC:
    /etc/perl
    /usr/local/lib/perl/5.10.0
    /usr/local/share/perl/5.10.0
    /usr/lib/perl5
    /usr/share/perl5
    /usr/lib/perl/5.10
    /usr/share/perl/5.10
    /usr/local/lib/site_perl
    .

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In reply to Unicode regular expressions by SilasTheMonk

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