What is the {L} Unicode category?

java regex unicode character-properties
uTubeFan picture uTubeFan · May 11, 2011 · Viewed 8.5k times · Source

I came across some regular expressions that contain [^\\p{L}]. I understand that this is using some form of a Unicode category, but when I checked the documentation, I found only the following "L" categories:

Lu  Uppercase letter    UPPERCASE_LETTER
Ll  Lowercase letter    LOWERCASE_LETTER
Lt  Titlecase letter    TITLECASE_LETTER
Lm  Modifier letter     MODIFIER_LETTER
Lo  Other letter        OTHER_LETTER

What is L in this context?

Answer

Favonius picture Favonius · May 11, 2011

Taken from this link: http://www.regular-expressions.info/unicode.html

Check the Unicode Character Properties section.

\p{L} matches a single code point in the category "letter". If your input string is à encoded as U+0061 U+0300, it matches a without the accent. If the input is à encoded as U+00E0, it matches à with the accent. The reason is that both the code points U+0061 (a) and U+00E0 (à) are in the category "letter", while U+0300 is in the category "mark".

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