Regex - Special alpha characters? - Python

Question

I have a list of simple names such as Márquez ,

because of the á (?< name >[a-zA-Z]+) doesn't seem to be working!

Help would be very much appreciated!

Answer 1

you could use

\w+

with the unicode flag. I assume there's no risk of having digits or underscore in your names.

>>> re.findall('\w+', 'Márquez', re.U)
['Márquez']

You also seem to be missing P after the question mark: (?P< name >[a-zA-Z]+)

Answer 2

For Python < 3 you may want to enable locale:

import locale
locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, '')

And then use re.LOCALE option with your regexpes:

re.findall('\w+', 'Márquez', re.LOCALE)

Though, probably Unicode is the better way to go, though it requires decoding the data from and encoding it to your local encoding.