From: Tim Bray <tbray@...>
Date: 2006-08-01T00:10:49+09:00
Subject: Re: state of unicode support (OT)

On Jul 31, 2006, at 7:52 AM, Alex Young wrote:

>>> First, Onigurama[2] is a regular expression engine.  It supports   
>>> Unicode regular
>>> expressions under many encodings, it's very handy.  If all you  
>>> want  to do is
>>> search strings for Unicode text, then great, use it.
>> Er uh well it doesn't do unicode properties so you can't use  
>> things  like \p{L}
>
> Off topic, what does/would that do?  Match a lower-case symbol?

Unicode characters have named properties.  "L" means it's a letter.   
There are sub-properties like Lu and Ll for upper and lower case.   
There are lots more properties for things like being numbers, being  
white-space, combining forms and particular properties of Asian  
characters and so on.  Tremendously useful in regexes, particularly  
for those of us round-eye gringos who are prone to write [a-zA-Z] and  
think we're matching letters, which we're not.  If you don't support  
properties, you don't support Unicode. -Tim