regex python with unicode (japanese) character issue

Question

I want to remove part of a string (shown in bold) below, this is stored in the string oldString

[DMSM-8433] 加護亜依 Kago Ai – 加護亜依 vs. FRIDAY

im using the following regex within python

p=re.compile(ur"( [W]+) (?=[A-Za-z ]+–)", re.UNICODE)
newString=p.sub("", oldString)

when i output the newString nothing has been removed

Answer 1

You can use the following snippet to solve the issue:

#!/usr/bin/python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
import re
str = u'[DMSM-8433] 加護亜依 Kago Ai – 加護亜依 vs. FRIDAY'
regex = u'[u3000-u303fu3040-u309fu30a0-u30ffuff00-uff9fu4e00-u9fafu3400-u4dbf]+ (?=[A-Za-z ]+–)'
p = re.compile(regex, re.U)
match = p.sub("", str)
print match.encode("UTF-8")

See IDEONE demo

Beside # -*- coding: utf-8 -*- declaration, I have added @nhahtdh's character class to detect Japanese symbols.

Note that the match needs to be encoded as UTF-8 string "manually" since Python 2 needs to be "reminded" we are working with Unicode all the time.