Handling accented letters in QRegularExpressions in Qt5

Question

I am accepting input for the full name of the user using QLineEdit, and I want to accept

all international characters

such as "é" in French or "æ", "ø", and "å" in Norwegian, while at the same time using QRegularExpressionValidator to ensure the name is in fact a valid name (no non-letter characters).

So the question is, do I have to list all such accented characters exhaustively, or is there some kind of "word class" that can be used, that allows me to trust Qt to provide an updated list for me?

What would be the best approach?

The canonical list on this topic: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/ — MSalters, Jun 23 '16 at 20:44
TX, and btw I simplified in the post saying "user name". Actually I am generating fictious robot's names so I get to determine the rules for what is a valid name or not :D — Mr. Developerdude, Jun 23 '16 at 20:50
Whaat? And not accepting robot names with non-breaking spaces in them, RTL control characters and whatnot? — peppe, Jun 23 '16 at 23:14

Wiktor Stribiżew · Accepted Answer · 2016-06-23T20:51:33.647

3

Yes, there is a \p{L} Unicode category class that will match all Unicode base letters.

This will match 1 or more letter chunks:

QRegularExpression re("\\p{L}+");

All uppercase letter variants: \p{Lu}

All lowercase letter variants: \p{Ll}

See Unicode categories for more information.

edited Jun 23 '16 at 20:51

answered Jun 23 '16 at 20:30

Wiktor Stribiżew

607,720
39
448
563

Holy macarony that was fast! Kudos to you! I will test it straight away! – Mr. Developerdude Jun 23 '16 at 20:31
Q: What about lower/upper case subsets? – Mr. Developerdude Jun 23 '16 at 20:37
Q: What about them? The vast majority of Unicode characters is neither. – MSalters Jun 23 '16 at 20:45

Handling accented letters in QRegularExpressions in Qt5

1 Answers1