Can the [a-zA-Z] Python regex pattern be made to match and replace non-ASCII Unicode characters?

Question

In the following regular expression, I would like each character in the string replaced with an \'X\', but it isn\'t working.

In Python 2.7:

>>         


        

Answer 1

You may use

(?![\d_])\w

With the Unicode modifier. The (?![\d_]) look-ahead is restricting the \w shorthand class so as it could not match any digits (\d) or underscores.

See regex demo

A Python 3 demo:

import re
print (re.sub(r"(?![\d_])\w","X","dfäg"))
# => XXXX

As for Python 2:

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
import re
s = "dfäg"
w = re.sub(ur'(?![\d_])\w', u'X', s.decode('utf8'), 0, re.UNICODE).encode("utf8")
print(w)