en.javascript.info/9-regular-expressions/21-regexp-unicode-properties/article.md

Unicode character properies \p

Unicode, the encoding format used by Javascript strings, has a lot of properties for different characters (or, technically, code points). They describe which "categories" character belongs to, and a variety of technical details.

In regular expressions these can be set by \p{…}. And there must be flag 'u'.

For instance, \p{Letter} denotes a letter in any of language. We can also use \p{L}, as L is an alias of Letter, there are shorter aliases for almost every property.

Here's the main tree of properties:

• Letter L:
  • lowercase Ll, modifier Lm, titlecase Lt, uppercase Lu, other Lo
• Number N:
  • decimal digit Nd, letter number Nl, other No:
• Punctuation P:
  • connector Pc, dash Pd, initial quote Pi, final quote Pf, open Ps, close Pe, other Po
• Mark M (accents etc):
  • spacing combining Mc, enclosing Me, non-spacing Mn
• Symbol S:
  • currency Sc, modifier Sk, math Sm, other So
• Separator Z:
  • line Zl, paragraph Zp, space Zs
• Other C:
  • control Cc, format Cf, not assigned Cn, private use Co, surrogate Cs.

Interested to see which characters belong to a property? There's a tool at <http://cldr.unicode.org/unicode-utilities/list-unicodeset> for that.

You could also explore properties at [Character Property Index](http://unicode.org/cldr/utility/properties.jsp).

For the full Unicode Character Database in text format (along with all properties), see <https://www.unicode.org/Public/UCD/latest/ucd/>.

There are also other derived categories, like:

• Alphabetic (Alpha), includes Letters L, plus letter numbers Nl (e.g. roman numbers Ⅻ), plus some other symbols Other_Alphabetic (OAltpa).
• Hex_Digit includes hexadimal digits: 0-9, a-f.
• ...Unicode is a big beast, it includes a lot of properties.

For instance, let's look for a 6-digit hex number:

let reg = /\p{Hex_Digit}{6}/u; // flag 'u' is requireds

alert("color: #123ABC".match(reg)); // 123ABC

There are also properties with a value. For instance, Unicode "Script" (a writing system) can be Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic, Han (Chinese) etc, the list is long.

To search for certain scripts, we should supply Script=<value>, e.g. to search for cyrillic letters: \p{sc=Cyrillic}, for Chinese glyphs: \p{sc=Han}, etc:

let regexp = /\p{sc=Han}+/gu; // get chinese words

let str = `Hello Привет 你好 123_456`;

alert( str.match(regexp) ); // 你好

Building multi-language \w

Let's make a "universal" regexp for pattern:\w, for any language. That task has a standard solution in many programming languages with unicode-aware regexps, e.g. Perl.

/[\p{Alphabetic}\p{Mark}\p{Decimal_Number}\p{Connector_Punctuation}\p{Join_Control}]/u

Let's decipher. Remember, pattern:\w is actually the same as pattern:[a-zA-Z0-9_].

So the character set includes:

• Alphabetic for letters,
• Mark for accents, as in Unicode accents may be represented by separate code points,
• Decimal_Number for numbers,
• Connector_Punctuation for the '_' character and alike,
• Join_Control -– two special code points with hex codes 200c and 200d, used in ligatures e.g. in arabic.

Or, if we replace long names with aliases (a list of aliases here):

let regexp = /([\p{Alpha}\p{M}\p{Nd}\p{Pc}\p{Join_C}]+)/gu;

let str = `Hello Привет 你好 123_456`;

alert( str.match(regexp) ); // Hello,Привет,你好,123_456