matching unicode characters in python regular expressions

Question

I have read thru the other questions at Stackoverflow, but still no closer. Sorry, if this is allready answered, but I didn`t get anything proposed there to work.

Answer 1

In Python 2, you need the re.UNICODE flag and the unicode string constructor

>>> re.sub(r"[\w]+","___",unicode(",./hello-=+","utf-8"),flags=re.UNICODE)
u',./___-=+'
>>> re.sub(r"[\w]+","___",unicode(",./cześć-=+","utf-8"),flags=re.UNICODE)
u',./___-=+'
>>> re.sub(r"[\w]+","___",unicode(",./привет-=+","utf-8"),flags=re.UNICODE)
u',./___-=+'
>>> re.sub(r"[\w]+","___",unicode(",./你好-=+","utf-8"),flags=re.UNICODE)
u',./___-=+'
>>> re.sub(r"[\w]+","___",unicode(",./你好，世界-=+","utf-8"),flags=re.UNICODE)
u',./___\uff0c___-=+'
>>> print re.sub(r"[\w]+","___",unicode(",./你好，世界-=+","utf-8"),flags=re.UNICODE)
,./___，___-=+

(In the latter case, the comma is Chinese comma.)

Answer 2

You need the UNICODE flag:

m = re.match(r'^/by_tag/(?P<tag>\w+)/(?P<filename>(\w|[.,!#%{}()@])+)$', '/by_tag/påske/øyfjell.jpg', re.UNICODE)

Answer 3

You need to specify the re.UNICODE flag, and input your string as a Unicode string by using the u prefix:

>>> re.match(r'^/by_tag/(?P<tag>\w+)/(?P<filename>(\w|[.,!#%{}()@])+)$', u'/by_tag/påske/øyfjell.jpg', re.UNICODE).groupdict()
{'tag': u'p\xe5ske', 'filename': u'\xf8yfjell.jpg'}

This is in Python 2; in Python 3 you must leave out the u because all strings are Unicode.