The Pug Automatic

Wikipedia on Regular expressions and Unicode

Written September 6, 2006. Tagged Facts, Interesting.

A third issue is variation in how ASCII-oriented constructs are extended to Unicode. For example, in ASCII-based implementations, character ranges of the form [x-y] are valid wherever x and y are codepoints in the range [0x00,0x7F] and codepoint(x) <= codepoint(y). The natural extension of such character ranges to Unicode would simply change the requirement that the endpoints lie in [0x00,0x7F] to the requirement that they lie in [0,0x1FFFFF]. However, in practice this is often not the case. Some implementations, such as that of gawk, do not allow character ranges to cross Unicode blocks. A range like [0x61,0x7F] is valid since both endpoints fall within the Basic Latin block, as is [0x0530,0x0560] since both endpoints fall within the Armenian block, but a range like [0x0061,0x0532] is invalid since it includes multiple Unicode blocks. Other engines, such as that of the Vim editor, allow block-crossing but limit the number of characters in a range to 128.

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