Why does \w match only English words in javascript regex?

Question

I'm trying to find URLs in some text, using javascript code. The problem is, the regular expression I'm using uses \w to match letters and digits inside the URL, but it doesn't match non-english characters (in my case - Hebrew letters).

So what can I use instead of \w to match all letters in all languages?

Answer 1

Because \w only matches ASCII characters 48-57 ('0'-'9'), 67-90 ('A'-'Z') and 97-122 ('a'-'z'). Hebrew characters and other special foreign language characters (for example, umlaut-o or tilde-n) are outside of that range.

Instead of matching foreign language characters (there are so many of them, in many different ASCII ranges), you might be better off looking for the characters that delineate your words - spaces, quotation marks, and other punctuation.

Answer 2

The ECMA 262 v3 standard, which defines the programming language commonly known as JavaScript, stipulates that \w should be equivalent to [a-zA-Z0-9_] and that \d should be equivalent to [0-9]. \s on the other hand matches both ASCII and Unicode whitespace, according to the standard.

JavaScript does not support the \p syntax for matching Unicode things either, so there isn't a good way to do this. You could match all Hebrew characters with:

[\u0590-\u05FF]

This simply matches any code point in the Hebrew block.

You can match any ASCII word character or any Hebrew character with:

[\w\u0590-\u05FF]

Answer 3

I think you are looking for this regex:

^[אבגדהוזחטיכלמנסעפצקרשתץףןםa-zA-z0-9\s\.\-_\\\/]+$