How to define regular expression campaigns for non-Latin words?

Question

The following regular expression works and matches any search query (no more than 25 characters), starting with the word "How", as an advertising request in Google Custom Search:

How\b.{0,25}\b 

However, this does not work when I use the non-Latin word UTF-8, for example, the Arabic "كيف":

 كيف\b.{0,25}\b 

Does anyone know a solution?

Answer 1

I'm not very familiar with Google Custom Search, but it looks like this is a regular expression of JavaScript, right?

If so, the problem is that \b indicates the boundary between the word character and the non-word character, where the word character is an ASCII letter, underscore, or number ( [A-Za-z_0-9] ) .

There is no general general solution; JavaScript simply knows nothing about individual characters outside the ASCII range, so it cannot determine which ones are letters and which are not. But you can write something like this:

 /^كيف(?:\s.{0,24})?$/ 

to match any query that is either just the word كيف or consists of the word كيف followed by a space character and up to 24 characters. I think this should come close to meeting your requirements.