Using Range In Regex For Arabic Letters

When using Regex in Python, it's easy to use brackets to represent a range of characters a-z, but this doesn't seem to be working for other languages, like Arabic: import re patter

Solution 1:

Since Arabic character is rendered from right to left, the correct string below, which reads "from ا to ي" is rendered backward (try to select the string if you want to confirm):

'[ا-ي]'

Console output:

>>> re.compile('[ا-ي]')
<_sre.SRE_Pattern object at 0x6001f0a80>

>>> re.compile('[ا-ي]', re.DEBUG)
inrange (1575, 1610)
<_sre.SRE_Pattern object at 0x6001f0440>

So your pattern '[ي-ا]', is actually "from ي to ا", which is an invalid range, since the code point of ا is smaller than code point of ي.

To prevent confusion, Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams's suggestion of using Unicode escape is a good alternative to the solution I provide above.

Solution 2:

Use Unicode escapes instead.

>>> re.compile('[\u0627-\u064a]')
<_sre.SRE_Pattern object at 0x237f460>

Solution 3:

The approved answer does work, however the unicode [\u0627-\u064a] does not include variations of the letters 'ا' such as 'أ', 'آ' or 'إ', and the letter 'و' with its' variation 'ؤ'. (I wanted to comment/suggest-edit to the approved answer but there's a queue)

So in case someone is (re)visiting this question and needs those letter variations, a unicode that worked better for me was [\u0600-\u06FF], making the answer:

pattern = re.compile('[\u0600-\u06FF]')