Regex match for a non-english language in Python

Question

I'm trying to capture and match russian language characters in a python script. Since russian characters don't fall in [a-Z] type, what regex should I should to match them. I can't use a (.*) because it would match everything.

linkpat = re.compile('name=[a-Z]+;size=[0-9]+')

Answer 1

Use unicode flag:

re.compile('name=\w+;size=\d+', re.U)

this would also match any letter in any language (plus underscore), not just Russian, though.

Answer 2

You can try \w with the correct LOCALE