Regex wordwrap with UTF8 characters in JS

Question

I've already read all the articles in here which touch a similar problem but still don't get any solution working. In my case I want to wrap each word of a string with a span. The words contain special characters like 'äüö...'

What I am doing at the moment is:

var textWrap = text.replace(/\b([a-zA-Z0-9ßÄÖÜäöüÑñÉéÈèÁáÀàÂâŶĈĉĜĝŷÊêÔôÛûŴŵ-]+)\b/g, "<span>$1</span>");

But what happens is that if the äüñ or whatever NON-Ascii character is at the end or at the beginning it also acts like a boundary. Being within a word these characters don't act as a boundary.

'Ärmelkanal' becomes Ä<span>rmelkanal</span> but should be <span>Ärmelkanal</span>
'Käse'works fine... becomes <span>Käse</span>
'diré' becomes <span>dir</span>é but should be <span>diré</span>

Any advice would be very appreciated. I need to do that on clientside. By the way, did I mention that I hate regular expressions?

Thank You very much!

Tim Pietzcker · Accepted Answer · 2010-09-24 13:42:45Z

1

The problem is that JavaScript recognizes word boundaries only before/after ASCII letters (and numbers/underscore). Just drop the \b anchors and it should work.

result = subject.replace(/[a-zA-Z0-9ßÄÖÜäöüÑñÉéÈèÁáÀàÂâŶĈĉĜĝŷÊêÔôÛûŴŵ-]+/g, "<span>$&</span>");

edited Sep 24, 2010 at 13:42

answered Sep 24, 2010 at 13:02

Tim Pietzcker

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1 Comment

Bosh Over a year ago

Looks awful ;-) But it works Thank you very very very much!!! And your solution is clever. Thanks for the good explanation!!!

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