How to match Cyrillic characters with a regular expression

Question

How do I match French and Russian Cyrillic alphabet characters with a regular expression? I only want to do the alpha characters, no numbers or special characters. Right now I have

[A-Za-z]

Answer 1

If your regex flavor supports Unicode blocks ([\p{IsCyrillic}]), you can match Cyrillic characters with:

[\p{IsCyrillic}] or [\p{Cyrillic}] 

Otherwise try using:

[U+0400–U+04FF] 

For PHP use:

[\x{0400}-\x{04FF}] 

Explanation:

[\p{IsCyrillic}]  Match a character from the Unicode block “Cyrillic” (U+0400–U+04FF) «[\p{IsCyrillic}]» 

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Note:

Unicode Characters list and Numeric HTML Entities of [U+0400–U+04FF] .

Answer 2

It depends on your regex flavor. If it supports Unicode character classes (like .NET, for instance), \p{L} matches a letter character (in any character set).