[Tutor] Unicode and regexes

[Michael Broe]

Does Python support the Unicode-flavored class-specifications in  
regular expressions, e.g. \p{L} ? It doesn't work in the following  
code, any ideas?

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#! /usr/local/bin/python

""" usage: ./uni_read.py file
"""
import codecs
import re

text = codecs.open(sys.argv[1], mode='r', encoding='utf-8').read()

unicode_property_pattern = re.compile(r"\p{L}")
dot_pattern = re.compile(".")

letters = unicode_property_pattern.findall(text)
characters = dot_pattern.findall(text)

print 'var letters =', letters
print 'var characters = ', characters

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The input file, encoded in utf-8 is

abc <followed by space, alpha, beta gamma>

The output is:

var letters = []
var characters =  [u'a', u'b', u'c', u' ', u'\u03b1', u'\u03b2',  
u'\u03b3']