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Postings from September 2014
Unicode defines a "script run" to be contiguous characters from the same script, like all Latin or all Greek. These can be important for security. See http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr36/ It seems to me that Perl should offer an easy way to specify that a regex pattern element should match only a script run. I'm proposing the only current illegal syntax that is easy to type that I'm aware of; other suggestions welcome. The idea I had is to have an extra '*' following the quantifier mean to use a script run. For example, qr/\w+*/ would match all the consecutive word characters that are in the same script as the first one found. In the case of digits, not only should they be from the same script but from the same group of consecutive 10 digits. There are a couple of cases where a script has multiple ways of specifying the 10 digits. Arabic, for example, has two different sets of digits. I learned recently that one set is used by the Sunnis and the other by the Shiites. The Common script in Unicode is used to mean that the character is in wide-spread use across many scripts. 0-9 are in the Common script, as is most punctuation and symbols. The Inherited script is used for characters that don't stand on their own, but modify other characters. This includes the combining accents and the like. I think that a script run should include not only the script of the first character in it, but also any contiguous Inherited characters. I'm leaning to including contiguous Common ones as well, but am less certain.Thread Next