On 2015-03-09 11:37, Wolfgang Maier wrote: > On 03/09/2015 11:23 AM, Antoon Pardon wrote: >> Does anyone know what regular expression to use for a sequence of >> letters? There is a class for alphanumerics but I can't find one >> for just letters, which I find odd. > > how about [a-zA-Z] ?
That breaks if you have Unicode letters. While ugly, since "\w" is composed of "letters, numbers, and underscores", you can assert that the "\w" you find is not a number or underscore by using (?:(?!_|\d)\w) as demonstrated: Python 3.2.3 (default, Feb 20 2013, 14:44:27) [GCC 4.7.2] on linux2 Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. >>> s = "áèîöçñ" >>> import re >>> r = re.compile(r'^[a-zA-Z]*$', re.U) >>> r.match(s) >>> r = re.compile(r"^(?:(?!_|\d)\w)*$", re.U) >>> r.match(s) <_sre.SRE_Match object at 0x7fb205da9850> I do miss that Python used "\a" for "start of string" rather than "alphabetic" like Vim does (and correspondingly "\A" for "not an alphabetic"). -tkc -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
