I was testing the behavior of the Pattern.UNICODE_CHARACTER_CLASS flag for different punctuation characters and noticed that the matches for grave accent character (U+0060) ` occur differently depending on whether Pattern.UNICODE_CHARACTER_CLASS is used.
For example, see the below code:
public class GraceAccentTest {
public static void main(String args[]) {
Pattern p = Pattern.compile("\\p{Punct}");
Matcher m = p.matcher("`");
System.out.println(m.matches()); // returns true
Pattern p1 = Pattern.compile("\\p{Punct}", Pattern.UNICODE_CHARACTER_CLASS);
Matcher m1 = p1.matcher("`");
System.out.println(m1.matches()); // returns false
}
}
When I don't use Pattern.UNICODE_CHARACTER_CLASS flag grave accent character matches with \p{Punct} character class but when I use the flag it doesn't match. Can someone explain the reasoning for this ?
When you use Pattern p = Pattern.compile("\\p{Punct}");, then \p{Punct} refers to the following 32 characters:
!"#$%&'()*+,-./:;<=>?#[\]^_`{|}~
Reference: the Pattern class.
These 32 characters correspond to the ASCII character set characters 0x21 through 0x7e, excluding letters and digits. They also happen to represent all the non-letter and non-digit symbols on my standard U.S. keyboard (your keyboard may be different, of course).
The grave accent (also known as a backtick) is in that list and on my keyboard.
That is a simple example of a "predefined character class" - and explains why your m.matches() returns true.
When you add the Pattern.UNICODE_CHARACTER_CLASS flag things get more complicated.
As the documentation for this flag explains, it:
Enables the Unicode version of Predefined character classes and POSIX character classes.
and:
When this flag is specified then the (US-ASCII only) Predefined character classes and POSIX character classes are in conformance with Unicode Technical Standard #18: Unicode Regular Expressions Annex C: Compatibility Properties.
Looking at the Annex C referred to above, we find a table showing the "recommended assignments for compatibility property names".
For our property name (punct), the standard recommendation is to use characters defined by this:
\p{gc=Punctuation}
Here, "gc" stands for "general category". Unicode characters are assigned a "general category" value. In this case, that is Punctuation - also abbreviated to P and further broken down into various sub-categories such as Pc for connectors, Pd for dashes, and so on. There is also a catch-all Po for "other punctuation characters".
The grave character is assigned to the Symbol general category in Unicode - and to the Modifier subcategory. You can see that assignment to Sk here.
Contrast that with a character such as the ASCII exclamation mark (also part of our original \p{Punct} list, shown above). For that we can see that the general category assignment is Po.
That explains why the grave is no longer matched when we add the Pattern.UNICODE_CHARACTER_CLASS flag to our original pattern.
It is assigned to a different general category from the punctuation category we are using in our regex.
The obvious next question is why did the grave character not get included in the Unicode Po general category? Why is it in Sk instead?
I do not have a good answer for that - I'm sure there are "historical reasons". It's worth noting, however, that the Sk cateogry includes characters such as the acute accent, the cedilla, the diaeresis, and so on - and (as already noted) our grave accent.
All these are diacritics - typically used in combination with a base letter to alter the pronunciation. So maybe that is the underlying reason.
The grave is a bit of an oddity, perhaps, given it has a historical usage outside of being used as a diacritic.
It may be more relevant to ask how the grave ended up as part of the original ASCII character set, in the first place. Some background about this is provided in the Wikipedia page for the backtick.
Reading the documentation for UNICODE_CHARACTER_CLASS
When this flag is specified then the (US-ASCII only) Predefined
character classes and POSIX character classes are in conformance with
Unicode Technical Standard #18: Unicode Regular Expression Annex C:
Compatibility Properties.
So this is saying that is using US-ASCII only. So if you check the table of characters Punctuation you will check there is a lot of missing chars.
Tables :
https://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/category/Po/list.htm
https://www.gaijin.at/en/infos/unicode-character-table-punctuation
Related
I need to validate name,saved in a String, which can be in any language with spaces using \p{L}:
You can match a single character belonging to the "letter" category with \p{L}
I tried to use String.matches, but it failed to match non English characters, even for 1 character, for example
String name = "อั";
boolean isMatch = name.matches("[\\p{L}]+")); // return false
I tried with/without brackets, adding + for multiple letters, but it's always failing to match non English characters
Is there an issue using String.matches with \p{L}?
I failed also using [\\x00-\\x7F]+ suggested in Pattern
\p{ASCII} All ASCII:[\x00-\x7F]
You should bear in mind that Java regex parses strings as collections of Unicode code units, not code points. \p{L} matches any Unicode letter from the BMP plane, it does not match letters glued with diacritics after them.
Since your input can contain letters and diacritics you should at least use both \p{L} and \p{M} Unicode property classes in your character class:
String regex = "[\\p{L}\\p{M}]+";
If the input string can contain words separated with whitespaces, you may add \s shorthand class and to match any kind of whitespace you may compile this regex with Pattern.UNICODE_CHARACTER_CLASS flag:
String regex = "(?U)[\\p{L}\\p{M}\\s]+";
Note that this regex allows entering diacritics, letters and whitespaces in any order. If you need a more precise regex (e.g. diacritics only allowed after a base letter) you may consider something like
String regex = "(?U)\\s*(?>\\p{L}\\p{M}*+)+(?:\\s+(?>\\p{L}\\p{M}*+)+)*\\s*";
Here, (?>\\p{L}\\p{M}*+)+ matches one or more letters each followed with zero or more diacritics, \s* matches zero or more whitespaces and \s+ matches 1 or more whitespaces.
\p{IsAlphabetic} vs. [\p{L}\p{M}]
If you check the source code, \p{Alphabetic} checks if Character.isAlphabetic(ch) is true. It is true if the char belongs to any of the following classes: UPPERCASE_LETTER, LOWERCASE_LETTER, TITLECASE_LETTER, MODIFIER_LETTER, OTHER_LETTER, LETTER_NUMBER or it has contributory property Other_Alphabetic. It is derived from Lu + Ll + Lt + Lm + Lo + Nl + Other_Alphabetic.
While all those L subclasses form the general L class, note that Other_Alphabetic also includes Letter number Nl class, and it includes more chars than \p{M} class, see this reference (although it is in German, the categories and char names are in English).
So, \p{IsAlphabetic} is broader than [\p{L}\p{M}] and you should make the right decision based on the languages you want to support.
The only solution I found is using \p{IsAlphabetic}
\p{Alpha} An alphabetic character:\p{IsAlphabetic}
boolean isMatch = name.matches("[ \\p{IsAlphabetic}]+"))
Which doesn't work in sites as https://regex101.com/ in demo
There are two characters there. The first is a letter, the second is a non-letter mark.
String name = "\u0e2d";
boolean isMatch = name.matches("[\\p{L}]+"); // true
works, but
String name = "\u0e2d\u0e31";
boolean isMatch = name.matches("[\\p{L}]+"); // false
does not because ั U+E31 is a Non-Spacing Mark [NSM], not a letter.
Googled that character to find the language. Seems to be Thai. Thai Unicode character range is: 0E00 to 0E7F:
When you are working with unicode characters you can use \u. So, the regex should be look like this:
[\u0E00-\u0E7F]
Which is match in this REGEX test with your character.
If you want to match any languages use this:
[\p{L}]
Which is match in this REGEX test with your example characters.
Try including more categories:
[\p{L}\p{Mn}\p{Mc}\p{Nl}\p{Pc}\p{Pd}\p{Po}\p{Sk}]+
Note that it might be best to simply not validate names. People can't really complain if they entered it wrong but your system didn't catch it. However, it's much more of a problem if someone is unable to enter their name. If you do insist on adding validation, please make it overridable: that should have the advantages of each method without their disadvantages.
Is there a special regex statement like \w that denotes all printable characters? I'd like to validate that a string only contains a character that can be printed--i.e. does not contain ASCII control characters like \b (bell), or null, etc. Anything on the keyboard is fine, and so are UTF chars.
If there isn't a special statement, how can I specify this in a regex?
Very late to the party, but this regexp works: /[ -~]/.
How? It matches all characters in the range from space (ASCII DEC 32) to tilde (ASCII DEC 126), which is the range of all printable characters.
If you want to strip non-ASCII characters, you could use something like:
$someString.replace(/[^ -~]/g, '');
NOTE: this is not valid .net code, but an example of regexp usage for those who stumble upon this via search engines later.
If your regex flavor supports Unicode properties, this is probably the best the best way:
\P{Cc}
That matches any character that's not a control character, whether it be ASCII -- [\x00-\x1F\x7F] -- or Latin1 -- [\x80-\x9F] (also known as the C1 control characters).
The problem with POSIX classes like [:print:] or \p{Print} is that they can match different things depending on the regex flavor and, possibly, the locale settings of the underlying platform. In Java, they're strictly ASCII-oriented. That means \p{Print} matches only the ASCII printing characters -- [\x20-\x7E] -- while \P{Cntrl} (note the capital 'P') matches everything that's not an ASCII control character -- [^\x00-\x1F\x7F]. That is, it matches any ASCII character that isn't a control character, or any non-ASCII character--including C1 control characters.
TLDR Answer
Use this Regex...
\P{Cc}\P{Cn}\P{Cs}
Working Demo
In this demo, I use this regex to search the string "Hello, World!_". I'm going to add a weird character at the end, (char)4 — this is the character for END TRANSMISSION.
using System;
using System.Text.RegularExpressions;
public class Test {
public static void Main() {
// your code goes here
var regex = new Regex(#"![\P{Cc}\P{Cn}\P{Cs}]");
var matches = regex.Matches("Hello, World!" + (char)4);
Console.WriteLine("Results: " + matches.Count);
foreach (Match match in matches) {
Console.WriteLine("Result: " + match);
}
}
}
Full Working Demo at IDEOne.com
TLDR Explanation
\P{Cc} : Do not match control characters.
\P{Cn} : Do not match unassigned characters.
\P{Cs} : Do not match UTF-8-invalid characters.
Alternatives
\P{C} : Match only visible characters. Do not match any invisible characters.
\P{Cc} : Match only non-control characters. Do not match any control characters.
\P{Cc}\P{Cn} : Match only non-control characters that have been assigned. Do not match any control or unassigned characters.
\P{Cc}\P{Cn}\P{Cs} : Match only non-control characters that have been assigned and are UTF-8 valid. Do not match any control, unassigned, or UTF-8-invalid characters.
\P{Cc}\P{Cn}\P{Cs}\P{Cf} : Match only non-control, non-formatting characters that have been assigned and are UTF-8 valid. Do not match any control, unassigned, formatting, or UTF-8-invalid characters.
Source and Explanation
Take a look at the Unicode Character Properties available that can be used to test within a regex. You should be able to use these regexes in Microsoft .NET, JavaScript, Python, Java, PHP, Ruby, Perl, Golang, and even Adobe. Knowing Unicode character classes is very transferable knowledge, so I recommend using it!
All Matchable Unicode Character Sets
If you want to know any other character sets available, check out regular-expressions.info...
\p{L} or \p{Letter}: any kind of letter from any language.
\p{Ll} or \p{Lowercase_Letter}: a lowercase letter that has an uppercase variant.
\p{Lu} or \p{Uppercase_Letter}: an uppercase letter that has a lowercase variant.
\p{Lt} or \p{Titlecase_Letter}: a letter that appears at the start of a word when only the first letter of the word is capitalized.
\p{L&} or \p{Cased_Letter}: a letter that exists in lowercase and uppercase variants (combination of Ll, Lu and Lt).
\p{Lm} or \p{Modifier_Letter}: a special character that is used like a letter.
\p{Lo} or \p{Other_Letter}: a letter or ideograph that does not have lowercase and uppercase
\p{M} or \p{Mark}: a character intended to be combined with another character (e.g. accents, umlauts, enclosing boxes, etc.).
\p{Mn} or \p{Non_Spacing_Mark}: a character intended to be combined with another
character without taking up extra space (e.g. accents, umlauts, etc.).
\p{Mc} or \p{Spacing_Combining_Mark}: a character intended to be combined with another character that takes up extra space (vowel signs in many Eastern languages).
\p{Me} or \p{Enclosing_Mark}: a character that encloses the character it is combined with (circle, square, keycap, etc.).
\p{Z} or \p{Separator}: any kind of whitespace or invisible separator.
\p{Zs} or \p{Space_Separator}: a whitespace character that is invisible, but does take up space.
\p{Zl} or \p{Line_Separator}: line separator character U+2028.
\p{Zp} or \p{Paragraph_Separator}: paragraph separator character U+2029.
\p{S} or \p{Symbol}: math symbols, currency signs, dingbats, box-drawing characters, etc.
\p{Sm} or \p{Math_Symbol}: any mathematical symbol.
\p{Sc} or \p{Currency_Symbol}: any currency sign.
\p{Sk} or \p{Modifier_Symbol}: a combining character (mark) as a full character on its own.
\p{So} or \p{Other_Symbol}: various symbols that are not math symbols, currency signs, or combining characters.
\p{N} or \p{Number}: any kind of numeric character in any script.
\p{Nd} or \p{Decimal_Digit_Number}: a digit zero through nine in any script except ideographic scripts.
\p{Nl} or \p{Letter_Number}: a number that looks like a letter, such as a Roman numeral.
\p{No} or \p{Other_Number}: a superscript or subscript digit, or a number that is not a digit 0–9 (excluding numbers from ideographic scripts).
\p{P} or \p{Punctuation}: any kind of punctuation character.
\p{Pd} or \p{Dash_Punctuation}: any kind of hyphen or dash.
\p{Ps} or \p{Open_Punctuation}: any kind of opening bracket.
\p{Pe} or \p{Close_Punctuation}: any kind of closing bracket.
\p{Pi} or \p{Initial_Punctuation}: any kind of opening quote.
\p{Pf} or \p{Final_Punctuation}: any kind of closing quote.
\p{Pc} or \p{Connector_Punctuation}: a punctuation character such as an underscore that connects words.
\p{Po} or \p{Other_Punctuation}: any kind of punctuation character that is not a dash, bracket, quote or connector.
\p{C} or \p{Other}: invisible control characters and unused code points.
\p{Cc} or \p{Control}: an ASCII or Latin-1 control character: 0x00–0x1F and 0x7F–0x9F.
\p{Cf} or \p{Format}: invisible formatting indicator.
\p{Co} or \p{Private_Use}: any code point reserved for private use.
\p{Cs} or \p{Surrogate}: one half of a surrogate pair in UTF-16 encoding.
\p{Cn} or \p{Unassigned}: any code point to which no character has been assigned.
There is a POSIX character class designation [:print:] that should match printable characters, and [:cntrl:] for control characters. Note that these match codes throughout the ASCII table, so they might not be suitable for matching other encodings.
Failing that, the expression [\x00-\x1f] will match through the ASCII control characters, although again, these could be printable in other encodings.
In Java, the \p{Print} option specifies the printable character class.
It depends wildly on what regex package you are using. This is one of these situations about which some wag said that the great thing about standards is there are so many to choose from.
If you happen to be using C, the isprint(3) function/macro is your friend.
Adding on to #Alan-Moore, \P{Cc} is actually as example of Negative Unicode Category or Unicode Block (ref: Character Classes in Regular Expressions). \P{name} matches any character that does not belong to a Unicode general category or named block. See the referred link for more examples of named blocks supported in .Net
I need to create a Pattern that will match all Unicode digits and alphabetic characters. So far I have "\\p{IsAlphabetic}|[0-9]".
The first part is working well for me, it's doing a good job of identifying non-Latin characters as alphabetic characters. The problem is the second half. Obviously it will only work for Arabic Numerals. The character classes \\d and \p{Digit} are also just [0-9]. The javadoc for Pattern does not seem to mention a character class for Unicode digits. Does anyone have a good solution for this problem?
For my purposes, I would accept a way to match the set of all characters for which Character.isDigit returns true.
Quoting the Java docs about isDigit:
A character is a digit if its general category type, provided by getType(codePoint), is DECIMAL_DIGIT_NUMBER.
So, I believe the pattern to match digits should be \p{Nd}.
Here's a working example at ideone. As you can see, the results are consistent between Pattern.matches and Character.isDigit.
Use \d, but with the (?U) flag to enable the Unicode version of predefined character classes and POSIX character classes:
(?U)\d+
or in code:
System.out.println("3๓३".matches("(?U)\\d+")); // true
Using (?U) is equivalent to compiling the regex by calling Pattern.compile() with the UNICODE_CHARACTER_CLASS flag:
Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile("\\d", Pattern.UNICODE_CHARACTER_CLASS);
Here's my current code:
return str.matches("^[A-Za-z\\-'. ]+");
I want it to include international letters. How do I do that in Java?
Thanks.
It seems that you want is, to match all the alphabetic characters. Typically you would do that by using Posix \p{Alpha} expression, extended by the punctuation you want also to permit. As Java Regular Expressions documentation says, it matches ASCII only.
However, what documentation does not say clearly is, you can make this class work with Unicode characters. To do just that you need to turn Unicode character class matching on.
You can do this in one of two ways:
By creating Pattern object passing the UNICODE_CHARACTER_CLASS constant:
Pattern p = Pattern.compile("^[p{Alpha}\\-'. ]+", UNICODE_CHARACTER_CLASS);
By using (?U) embedded pattern flag:
str.matches("^(?U)[\\p{Alpha}\\-'. ]+");
Prove of concept:
String[] test = {"Jean-Marie Le'Blanc", "Żółć", "Ὀδυσσεύς", "原田雅彦"};
for (String str : test) {
System.out.print(str.matches("^(?U)[\\p{Alpha}\\-'. ]+") + " ");
}
The obvious result is:
true true true true
If you think that all is correct, I have two additional points to make:
原田雅彦 (Masahiko Harada) is composed of Ideographic characters. In fact they are not the alphabetic characters,
You want to match the dot (.) symbol. It's OK, but please consider matching Ideographic fullstops as well.
I assume you want to match alphanumeric characters other than the ASCII letters A-Z. You can do this with the \p{IsAlphabetic} Unicode character class:
return str.matches("^[\\p{IsAlphabetic}\\-'. ]+");
You'll find more Unicode character classes the full documentation.
Replace the pattern with:
"^[\\p{L}\\-'. ]+"
\p{L} includes all unicode letters.
Use the regex \P{L} to match any letters (national or international)
By adding [\p{L}&&[^\p{IsLatin}]], you can match all letters that are not latin.
Especially for Greek, regex has \p{InGreek} to match Greek letters and \P{InGreek}(the difference is capital P) to match non Greek letters.
The question cannot be answered completely unless you say what you mean by "international letters", but the general solution is to use named character classes, via the \p{name} syntax. There are many named character classes. Some are defined by the regex language, and others by the Unicode standard. Refer to the Pattern javadocs for a partial list, and to the relevant Unicode standard.
To match A to Z, we will use regex:
[A-Za-z]
How to allow regex to match utf8 characters entered by user? For example Chinese words like 环保部
What you are looking for are Unicode properties.
e.g. \p{L} is any kind of letter from any language
So a regex to match such a Chinese word could be something like
\p{L}+
There are many such properties, for more details see regular-expressions.info
Another option is to use the modifier
Pattern.UNICODE_CHARACTER_CLASS
In Java 7 there is a new property Pattern.UNICODE_CHARACTER_CLASS that enables the Unicode version of the predefined character classes see my answer here for some more details and links
You could do something like this
Pattern p = Pattern.compile("\\w+", Pattern.UNICODE_CHARACTER_CLASS);
and \w would match all letters and all digits from any languages (and of course some word combining characters like _).
To address NLS support and avoid accepting English special character, we can use below pattern...
[a-zA-Z0-9 \u0080-\u9fff]*+
For UTF code point reference: http://www.utf8-chartable.de/unicode-utf8-table.pl
Code snippet:
String vowels = "అఆఇఈఉఊఋఌఎఏఐఒఓఔౠౡ";
String consonants = "కఖగఘఙచఛజఝఞటఠడఢణతథదధనపఫబభమయరఱలళవశషసహ";
String signsAndPunctuations = "కఁకంకఃకాకికీకుకూకృకౄకెకేకైకొకోకౌక్కౕకౖ";
String symbolsAndNumerals = "౦౧౨౩౪౫౬౭౮౯";
String engChinesStr = "ABC導字會";
Pattern ALPHANUMERIC_AND_SPACE_PATTERN_TELUGU = Pattern
.compile("[a-zA-Z0-9 \\u0c00-\\u0c7f]*+");
System.out.println(ALPHANUMERIC_AND_SPACE_PATTERN_TELUGU.matcher(vowels)
.matches());
Pattern ALPHANUMERIC_AND_SPACE_PATTERN_CHINESE = Pattern
.compile("[a-zA-Z0-9 \\u4e00-\\u9fff]*+");
Pattern ENGLISH_ALPHANUMERIC_SPACE_AND_NLS_PATTERN = Pattern
.compile("[a-zA-Z0-9 \\u0080-\\u9fff]*+");
System.out.println(ENGLISH_ALPHANUMERIC_SPACE_AND_NLS_PATTERN.matcher(engChinesStr)
.matches());
To match individual characters, you can simply include them in an a character class, either as literals or via the \u03FB syntax.
Obviously you often cannot list all allowed characters in ideographic languages. To make the regex treat unicode characters according to their type or code block, various other escapes are supported that are defined here. Look at the section "Unicode support", particularly the references to the Character class and to the Unicode Standard itself.
the Java regular expression API works on the char type
the char type is implicitly UTF-16
if you have UTF-8 data you will need to transcode it to UTF-16 on input if this is not already being done
Unicode is the universal set of characters and UTF-8 can describe all of it (including control characters, punctuation, symbols, letters, etc.) You will have to be more specific about what you want to include and what you want to exclude. Java regular expressions uses the \p{category} syntax to match codepoints by category. See the Unicode standard for the list of categories.
If you want to identify and separate words in a sequence of ideographs, you will need to look at a more sophisticated API. I would start with the BreakIterator type.
Starting from Java 9, you can also use \X to match any Unicode extended grapheme cluster. See more at Java Doc: Pattern.