Regex “\w” doesn't process utf-8 characters in Ruby 1.9.2

Question

Regex \\w doesn't match utf-8 characters in Ruby 1.9.2. Anybody faced same problem?

Example:

/[\w\s]+/u

In my rails application.rb I've added config.encoding = "utf-8"

Answer 1

Define "doesn't match utf-8 characters"? If you expect \\w to match anything other than exactly the uppercase and lowercase ASCII letters, the ASCII digits, and underscore, it won't -- Ruby has defined \\w to be equivalent to [A-Za-z0-9_] regardless of Unicode. Maybe you want \\p{Word} or something similar instead.

Ref: Ruby 1.9 Regexp documentation (see section "Character Classes").

Answer 2

You could always use something like

[a-zA-Z0-9_ñáéíóú] 

instead of \\w