Writing python regex that recognizes all unicode letters

Question

There is no [\\p{Ll}\\p{Lo}\\ 1 in python, and I'm struggling to write a regular expression that recognizes unicode...and doesn't confuse punctuation such as '-' or add funny diacritics when the script encounters a phonetic mark (like 'ô' or 'طس').

My goal is to label ALL letters (ASCII and any unicode) and return an "A". A number [1-9] as a 9.

My current function is:

def multiple_replace(myString):
    myString = re.sub(r'(?u)[^\W\d_]|-','A', myString)
    myString = re.sub(r'[0-9]', '9', myString)
    return myString

The returns I am getting are (notice the incosistency in how '-' is being labeled...sometimes as an 'A' sometimes as a 'Aœ'):

TX 35-L | AA 99AA
М-21 | AAœA99
A 1 طس | A 9 A~˜A·A~AA
US-50 | AAA99
yeni sinop-erfelek yolu çevre yolu | AAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAA AƒA§AAAA AAAA
Av Antônio Ribeiro | AA AAAAƒA´AAA AAAAAAA

What I need to get is this:

TX 35-L | AA 99-A
М-21 | A-99
A 1 طس | A 9 AAAAA
US-50 | AA-99
yeni sinop-erfelek yolu çevre yolu | AAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAA AAAAAAAA AAAA
Av Antônio Ribeiro | AA AAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAA

...is it even possible (with python re 2.7) to commonly identify ALL UTF-8 characters that ARE NOT common punctuation marks (ie '()', ',', '.', '-', etc) and NOT 1-9 numbers without [\\p{Ll}\\p{Lo}\\?

Answer 1

If using Python 2.7, use Unicode strings. I'm assuming your "What I need" examples are incorrect, or do you really want AAAAA for طس ? If reading the strings from a file, decode the strings to Unicode first.

#!python2
#coding: utf8
import re

# Note leading u
data = u'TX 35-L|М-21|A 1 طس|US-50|yeni sinop-erfelek yolu çevre yolu|Av Antônio Ribeiro'.split('|')

for d in data:
    r = re.sub(ur'(?u)[^\W\d_]',u'A', d)
    r = re.sub(ur'[0-9]', u'9', r)
    print d
    print r
    print

Output:

TX 35-L
AA 99-A

М-21
A-99

A 1 طس
A 9 AA

US-50
AA-99

yeni sinop-erfelek yolu çevre yolu
AAAA AAAAA-AAAAAAA AAAA AAAAA AAAA

Av Antônio Ribeiro
AA AAAAAAA AAAAAAA

Answer 2

Not sure why my answer just got deleted, but here is what I went forth with:

function (regex):

def multiple_replace(myString):
    myString = re.sub(ur'(?u)[^\W\d_]', u'A', myString)
    myString = re.sub(ur'[0-9]', u'9', myString)
    return myString

call (w/ decoding):

with codecs.open(r'test5.txt', 'w', 'utf-8') as outfile1:
    for row in reader:
        unicode_row = [x.decode('utf-8') for x in row]
        item = unicode_row[csv_col_index]
        outfile1.write(row[1] + "," + item + "," + multiple_replace(item) + "\n")