From: Luciano Ramalho <ramalho@...>
Date: 2006-12-17T05:32:15+09:00
Subject: Re: newb: Rails character encoding and validation

On 12/16/06, David Vallner <david@vallner.net> wrote:
> It is so viable. Just not using [a-zA-Z].
>
> Character classes are your friend.

You mean, using the Unicode database?

Yes, I know that is possible. My point was that it is not worthwhile
(that's why I wrote "not viable" instead of "impossible"; sorry if I
was not clear: English is not my first language).

Besides all sort of letter-like characters, ideograms and so on, a
person's name may contain hyphens, apostrophes and who-knows-what
other characters.

Remember Prince's name when he used to be called "the artist formerly
known as Prince"? [1]

I just do not think it is "economically viable" the effort to try to
validate a name, except to verify that it contains something other
than blanks.

BTW, which would be a safe way to know whether a Unicode string
contains something other than blanks? Because AFAIK unicode has many
other blank characters besides the old ASCII ones. Can a Ruby regex
cope with that?

Cheers,

Luciano

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_(musician)