regex - Amend Regular Expression to allow German umlauts, French accents and other valid European letters

Question

I need to validate a text input so a user can insert characters/text that may include German umlauts, French accents and any other valid European characters, for example the minuscule ?.

I am using AngularJS so I am applying my validation rule to the ng-pattern attribute like so:

ng-pattern="/^[A-Za-z0-9 -_.]*$/"

I was hoping this would cover characters like ??ü? but when testing it doesn't. Sorry to ask such a lame question but I am really bad at RegEx! There must be a better way than manually listing the letters like so ng-pattern="/^[A-Za-z0-9??ü??ü -_.]*$/"

Answer 1

Javascript regexes don't support unicode properties, the only way to include non-latin letters is to list them explicitly in your expression:

 [A-Za-z0-9 -_.??ü? etc]

or use unicode ranges, e.g

 [A-Za-z0-9 -_.u00C0-u00D6u00D8-u00F6u00F8-u00FF]

(see http://www.utf8-chartable.de/ for reference).