Regular Expressions: Unicode Property Escapes

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As we saw above, in a regular expression pattern you can use \d to match any digit, \s to match any character that’s not a white space, \w to match any alphanumeric character, and so on.

Unicode property escapes extends this concept to all Unicode characters introducing \p{} and its negation \P{}.

Any unicode character has a set of properties. For example Script determines the language family, ASCII is a boolean that’s true for ASCII characters, and so on. You can put this property in the graph parentheses, and the regex will check for that to be true:

/^\p{ASCII}+$/u.test('abc')   //✅
/^\p{ASCII}+$/u.test('ABC@')  //✅
/^\p{ASCII}+$/u.test('ABC🙃') //❌

ASCII_Hex_Digit is another boolean property, that checks if the string only contains valid hexadecimal digits:

/^\p{ASCII_Hex_Digit}+$/u.test('0123456789ABCDEF') //✅
/^\p{ASCII_Hex_Digit}+$/u.test('h')                //❌

There are many other boolean properties, which you just check by adding their name in the graph parentheses, including Uppercase, Lowercase, White_Space, Alphabetic, Emoji and more:

/^\p{Lowercase}$/u.test('h') //✅
/^\p{Uppercase}$/u.test('H') //✅

/^\p{Emoji}+$/u.test('H')   //❌
/^\p{Emoji}+$/u.test('🙃🙃') //✅

In addition to those binary properties, you can check any of the unicode character properties to match a specific value. In this example, I check if the string is written in the greek or latin alphabet:

/^\p{Script=Greek}+$/u.test('ελληνικά') //✅
/^\p{Script=Latin}+$/u.test('hey') //✅

Read more about all the properties you can use directly on the TC39 proposal.

Lessons in this unit:

0: Introduction
1: Introduction
2: Anchoring
3: Match Items in Ranges
4: Matching a Range Item Multiple Times
5: Negating a Pattern
6: Meta Characters
7: Regular Expressions Choices
8: Quantifiers
9: Optional Items
10: Groups
11: Capturing Groups
12: Using match and exec Without Groups
13: Noncapturing Groups
14: Flags
15: Inspecting a Regex
16: Escaping
17: String Boundaries
18: Replacing
19: Greediness
20: Lookaheads
21: Lookbehinds
22: Unicode
23: ▶︎ Unicode Property Escapes
24: Examples