Re^3: Regex Matching Unicode and Regex Classes

Short answer: because Unicode and locales don't mix.

Long answer: Perl's support for locales comes from a time before the whole encoding/decoding business and Unicode support. So if locales are active, the locale-sensitive parts expect to act on bytes, not on decoded strings.

Since the locale is not ISO-8859-1 but UTF-8, encoding to Latin-1 doesn't fix it for you.

If anything, you'd need to encode to UTF-8 to see the \w matching ä, but even then I don't see it matching. So either my understanding of locales is very wrong, or perl is broken (or a mixture thereof).

Perl 6 - second systems done right

Comment on Re^3: Regex Matching Unicode and Regex Classes

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Re^4: Regex Matching Unicode and Regex Classes by McA (Priest) on Nov 02, 2011 at 14:48 UTC
Hi Moritz, that sounds plausible, but not satisfying. ;-) What is then the right approach to find word boundaries with regex while locale is enabled? Best regards Andreas	[reply]
Re^5: Regex Matching Unicode and Regex Classes by moritz (Cardinal) on Nov 02, 2011 at 14:53 UTC
Don't enable a locale for that. When you need a locale, only enable it a lexical scope as small as possible. Perl 6 - second systems done right	[reply]
Re^5: Regex Matching Unicode and Regex Classes by choroba (Cardinal) on Nov 02, 2011 at 14:58 UTC
I gave you a solution in Re: Regex Matching Unicode and Regex Classes. But be careful and watch for bugs.	[reply]