From: Matthew Smillie <M.B.Smillie@...>
Date: 2006-01-30T06:13:58+09:00
Subject: Re: Premature end of regular expression with non-ascii character

> I'm trying to get regular expressions to work with a string that
> contains letters with accents. I have the following sentence:
>
> De kin� weet ��n van hun pati�nten te overtuigen om gekke dingen te
> doen.
>
> The regexp /pati�nten/ matches the word pati�nten. However when I  
> do the
> regexp /kin�/, I get the error 'premature end of regular expression:
> /kin�/ (SyntaxError)'. Can anybody tell me what is going on? Another
> issue with the same sentence is, when I use the regexp /\s/ to  
> highlight
> all the spaces, the space between 'kin� weet' is not highlighted as a
> space. It seems like regular expressions cann't handle non-ascii
> characters at the end of a string.


I believe this is a character encoding problem which is fixed in 1.9  
by the inclusion of a new regular expression engine (Which you can  
also download and use in 1.8):

http://www.geocities.jp/kosako3/oniguruma/

Best of luck.
matt.