How to match unicode words with ruby 1.9?

Question

I'm using ruby 1.9 and trying to find out which regex I need to make this true:

Encoding.default_internal = Encoding.default_external = 'utf-8'
"föö".match(/(\w+)/u)[1] == "föö"
# => false

Answer 1

You can manually turn on Unicode matching using the inside (?u) syntax:

"föö".match(/(?u)(\w+)/)[1] == "föö"
# => true

However, using Unicode Property Syntax (steenslag's answer) or POSIX Brackets Syntax is better style, since they both automatically respect Unicode codepoints:

"föö".match(/(\p{word}+)/)[1] == "föö"
# => true

"föö".match(/([[:word:]]+)/)[1] == "föö"
# => true

See this blog post for more info about matching Unicode characters in Ruby regexes.

Answer 2

# encoding=utf-8 
p "föö".match(/\p{Word}+/)[0] == "föö"