Internationalizing Regular Expressions
The purpose of this post is to encourage all of you who are teaching Regular Expressions (RegExp) or are learning RegExp to think international. Think beyond ASCII. Thinking international means thinking Unicode instead of ASCII. Once one thinks Unicode then one is encompassing the world. My RegExp teaching slides use ASCII only as a starting point. They then progress to Unicode. I give one of my slides as an example. There is a lot of information packed into this one slide which needs some explanation. My example slide is using Unicode Chinese characters and Unicode Emoji characters. 人 is a Unicode Chinese character meaning person 鸭 is a Unicode Chinese character meaning duck 鸡 is a Unicode Chinese character meaning chicken This slide also contains a cultural reference. Some time ago I came across a Weibo 微博 post about the visit to Hong Kong by the big floating yellow duck http://edition.cnn.com/2013/05/02/travel/hong-kong-giant-duck/ The Weibo post had a photo containing many people ...