Use ready-made character class and restrict it further

Question

Lots of ready-to-use character classes are available in Perl regular expressions, such as \d or \S, or new-fangled Unicode grokkers such as \p{P}, which matches punctuation characters.

Now let's say I'd like to match all punctuation characters \p{P} (quite a number of them, and not something you want to type in by hand) - all but one, all but the good old komma (or comma, ,).

Is there a way to specify this requirement short of expanding the handy character class and taking away the komma by hand?

Found a very similar question, well, basically the same question: [How to match any non white space character except a particular one in Perl?](http://stackoverflow.com/a/6125137/269126) — Lumi, Dec 14 '11 at 13:00

ikegami · Accepted Answer · 2011-12-14T12:03:33.483

9

$ unichars -au '\p{P}' | wc -l
598

Double negation:

/[^\P{P},]/

$ unichars -au '[^\P{P},]' | wc -l
597

"And" through lookahead/lookbehind:

/\p{P}(?<!,)/

$ unichars -au '\p{P}(?<!,)' | wc -l
597

unichars

edited Dec 14 '11 at 12:03

answered Dec 14 '11 at 11:52

ikegami

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Great, thanks! Also very useful: your link to the `unichars` script. – Lumi Dec 14 '11 at 13:08

score 7 · Answer 2 · answered Dec 14 '11 at 11:50

7

Try this

[^\P{P},]

This is a negated character class, that matches all but the listed characters.

\P{P} negated \p{P}

answered Dec 14 '11 at 11:50

stema

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Use ready-made character class and restrict it further

2 Answers2