UTF in Python Regex

Question

I'm aware that Python 3 fixes a lot of UTF issues, I am not however able to use Python 3, I am using 2.5.1

I'm trying to regex a document but the document has UTF hyphens in it – rather than -. Python can't match these and if I put them in the regex it throws a wobbly.

How can I force Python to use a UTF string or in some way match a character such as that?

Thanks for your help

Answer 1

You have to escape the character in question (–) and put a u in front of the string literal to make it a unicode string.

So, for example, this:

re.compile("–") 

becomes this:

re.compile(u"\u2013")