c# - Regular expression to catch letters beyond a-z

Question

A normal regexp to allow letters only would be "[a-zA-Z]" but I'm from, Sweden so I would have to change that into "[a-z???A-Z???]". But suppose I don't know what letters are used in the alphabet.

Is there a way to automatically know what chars are are valid in a given locale/language or should I just make a blacklist of chars that I (think I) know I don't want?

Answer 1

You can use pL to match any 'letter', which will support all letters in all languages. You can narrow it down to specific languages using 'named blocks'. More information can be found on the Character Classes documentation on MSDN.

My recommendation would be to put the regular expression (or at least the "letter" part) into a localised resource, which you can then pull out based on the current locale and form into the larger pattern.