Regex question

General
1

I’d like to be able to detect if a character is a punctuation mark (ideally in a unicode-savvy fashion, so the smart quotes would be recognized as punctuation). I can hard code comparisons to code points, but I suspect this can be done more elegantly with Regex. \W looks like it might work, but is ASCII only. Any Regex guru out there who can point me to a better expression? Thanks.

2

\W works here. This code matches every character:

  dim sourceText as string = """“”‘’"
  
  dim rx as new RegEx
  rx.SearchPattern = "\\W"
    
  dim match as RegExMatch = rx.Search( sourceText )
  while match <> nil 
    AddToResult match.SubExpressionString( 0 )
    match = rx.Search
  wend
3

Thanks. But that picks up non-punctuation characters, too, such as space and (accented e).

4

Right. If you want to get just punctuations, you would have to create your own set. You can start with the POSIX class [:punct:] and add the Unicode characters to it. Something like this:

[[:punct:]“”’‘]
5

Got it. Thanks.

6

And if you switch to RegExMBS, you can use the Unicode-specific properties so you could do this:

[[:punct:]\\pP]
7

BTW, you can see that in action using RegExRX as I used RegExMBS as the engine.