in reply to umlauts, special chars in perl regular expressions

Answer: it depends how the data is encoded. If it is utf8, \w will use utf8 rules for what is a letter (though this has been hotly debated; you may be better off using \p{Word} instead; see 5.8's perlre).

If there are those characters in the 128-255 range but it is not utf8 encoded, you either make it so (see utf8), or do "use locale;" and have the LANG environment var set to a suitable locale.

  • Comment on Re: umlauts, special chars in perl regular expressions

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Re: umlauts, special chars in perl regular expressions
by amonroy (Scribe) on Apr 21, 2004 at 23:32 UTC
    how do you make sure a string it's utf-8 encoded?
    I tried this and I don't get what I would expect. 
    my $string = 'e1ņe';
if ($string =~ /^\w+$/) {
    print "yes";
} else {
    print "no";
}
print "\n";

__OUTPUT___
yes

    [download]
[reply]
[d/l]
      Some of the ways: 
      $outstr = $instr; utf8::upgrade($outstr);
# or
$outstr = Encode::decode("latin-1", $instr);
# or add and remove a utf8 character:
$outstr = $instr . "\x{100}"; chop $outstr;

      [download]
[reply]
[d/l]

In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom