Regular Expressions and Special Characters

[TheFaQQer]

Does anyone know of an easy way to use regular expressions to replace special characters?

I'm trying to compare data from two tables to see where there are discrepancies, but a lot of them contain special characters. The business have said that if the character is the same without any accent, then that's OK by them - so if one system says "n" and the other says "ñ" then they want that to match.

So, I was hoping to do a regular expression replace on the text in both tables to replace "ñ" with "n" in both systems, and the same for a,e,i,o,u etc. etc.

Apart from going through a character map, does anyone know of a regular expression syntax that I can use to do the replacement?

[rashm2k]

Would in not be better to find all the accented letters? And replace those or add them to your regex

A simple regex will do that.

[mudskipper]

What language are you using? The term you need to google is diacritics.

[mudskipper]

Is this Oracle?

Linguistic Sorting and String Searching

[DaveB]

If you're using (or could use) an up to date build of PERL you can use Unicode::Normalize to do it for you

Unicode::Normalize - perldoc.perl.org

In fact any language that explicitly supports Unicode should have a Normalization module available

[TheFaQQer]

Would in not be better to find all the accented letters? And replace those or add them to your regex

A simple regex will do that.

That's one way to do it, but I was wondering if there was a standard way to do it - for example, Oracle has a [:punct:] option which will remove all punctuation.

At the moment, I've gone looking for special characters, but since we are multi-muilti-lingual, there are lots of characters that I could expect, and if I've missed one then I'll need to make more changes to add in extra characters.

[TheFaQQer]

Is this Oracle?

Linguistic Sorting and String Searching

Thanks - there's some things in there that I might need to plug into my code.

[mudskipper]

Thanks

We should have a button for that....

[mudskipper]

We should have a button for that....

... although a pint would be equally acceptable.

[TheFaQQer]

... although a pint would be equally acceptable.

It wasn't THAT helpful

Have a instead.