Regex word-breaker in unicode

Question

How do I convert the regular expression \w+ To give me the whole words in Unicode – not just ASCII?

I use .net

Answer 1

In .NET, \w will match Unicode characters that are Unicode letters or digits. For example, it would match ì and Æ.

To just match ASCII characters, you could use [a-zA-Z0-9].

Answer 2

This works as expected for me

        string foo = "Hola, la niña está gritando en alemán: Maüschen raus!";
        Regex r = new Regex(@"\w+");
        MatchCollection mc = r.Matches(foo);
        foreach (Match ma in mc)
        {
            Console.WriteLine(ma.Value);
        }

It outputs

Hola
la
niña
está
gritando
en
alemán
Maüschen
raus

Are you using .Match() instead of .Matches()?

Another possible explanation is that you have a non word character in what you expect to receive, like a comma.

Answer 3

You should take a look at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/yd1hzczs.aspx#ECMAScript
There's also a nice Cheat Sheet for using regex in .net: http://regexlib.com/CheatSheet.aspx

Answer 4

The "official" Unicode identifier for letters is \p{L}, for numbers \p{N}. So for completeness' sake, in cases where \w doesn't extend to Unicode letters/numbers, the equivalent for \w+ would be [\p{L}\p{N}\p{Pc}]+. Don't forget that the underscore and other "punctuation connector" characters are also contained in \w (so you can decide yourself whether to keep them or not).