Hi,
I'd like to write a regexp that converts all special chars to "-".
I've used this pattern
[^a-z0-9]
with ignore case, and it works beautifully.
BUT - I want to support also unicode chars (and not escape them).
I could not find a way to do it, except for listing all special
characters "manually" and escaping them. I'd rather prepare
"whitelist" - of the chars allowed, then a "blacklist" of all special
chars.
Any ideas?
Thanx,
Gabi

Gabriela wrote:

> I'd like to write a regexp that converts all special chars to "-".
> I've used this pattern
> [^a-z0-9]
> with ignore case, and it works beautifully.
> BUT - I want to support also unicode chars (and not escape them).
> I could not find a way to do it, except for listing all special
> characters "manually" and escaping them. I'd rather prepare
> "whitelist" - of the chars allowed, then a "blacklist" of all special
> chars.

Well in a language where a string is a sequence of Unicode characters 
any character is an Unicode character so I have no idea which kind of 
characters you want to convert and which not.

-- 

	Martin Honnen
	http://JavaScript.FAQTs.com/

On Dec 22, 5:57 pm, Martin Honnen <mahotr...@yahoo.de> wrote:
> Gabriela wrote:
> > I'd like to write a regexp that converts all special chars to "-".
> > I've used this pattern
> > [^a-z0-9]
> > with ignore case, and it works beautifully.
> > BUT - I want to support also unicode chars (and not escape them).
> > I could not find a way to do it, except for listing all special
> > characters "manually" and escaping them. I'd rather prepare
> > "whitelist" - of the chars allowed, then a "blacklist" of all special
> > chars.
>
> Well in a language where a string is a sequence of Unicode characters
> any character is an Unicode character so I have no idea which kind of
> characters you want to convert and which not.
>
> --
>
>         Martin Honnen
>        http://JavaScript.FAQTs.com/

Isn't there a distinction between a special character (!@#$%^&*()_-
+..._) and all alphanumeric/literal characters?

Gabriela wrote:

> Isn't there a distinction between a special character (!@#$%^&*()_-
> +..._) and all alphanumeric/literal characters?

Maybe you are looking for letters and digits. Unicode defines classes 
for that but the regular expression language in JavaScript/ECMAScript 
does not have much support such constructs.
   \d
is defined as 0..9, \D as anything which is not in \d.
   \w
is defined as a..zA..Z0..9_, \W as anything which is not in \w.
Then there is \s for white space characters. And \S for anything not a 
white space character.

Other than that you need to define your own ranges of characters.


-- 

	Martin Honnen
	http://JavaScript.FAQTs.com/

Gabriela wrote:

> Hi,
> I'd like to write a regexp that converts all special chars to "-".
> I've used this pattern
> [^a-z0-9]
> with ignore case, and it works beautifully.
> BUT - I want to support also unicode chars (and not escape them).
> I could not find a way to do it, except for listing all special
> characters "manually" and escaping them. I'd rather prepare
> "whitelist" - of the chars allowed, then a "blacklist" of all special
> chars.
> Any ideas?
> Thanx,
> Gabi

Just remember, it's better to deny all by default and then specifically
have a list (whitelist) of allowed characters, than to try and
specifically list all invalid characters.
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