Locale-aware Perl regular expressions (matching word boundaries)
internationalization, locale, perl, regex
Solution
I would expect that the regex result in "Täs*******". And this is what I get when I "use utf8" in a utf-8 encoded file with your code above.
(If everything is latin-1, that changes the behavior of the regex engine. Hence the existence of `utf8::upgrade`. See Unicode::Semantics.)
Edit: I see you fixed your post and that we agree on the expected result. Basically, use Unicode::Semantics when you want Unicode semantics on your regexps.
Problem
I'm currently somewhat stuck getting a regular expression in Perl (taken from an earlier question of mine) to match word characters from a non-ASCII locale (i.e., German umlauts). I already tried various things such as setting the correct locale (using setlocale), converting data that I receive from MySQL to UTF8 (using decode_utf8), and so on... Unfortunately, to no avail. Google also did not help much. Is there any chance to get the following regex locale-aware so that ``` $street = "Täststraße"; # I know that this is not orthographically correct $street =~ s{ \b (\w{0,3}) (\w*) \b } { $1 . ( '*' x length $2 ) }gex; ``` ends up returning `$street = "Täs*******"` instead of `"Tästs***ße"`?