Javascript regex alphabetic with few international characters

Question

I need a javascript function for validating alphabetic input with a few extra characters from the Italian languages, namely: àèéìòóù

I saw a regex before with something like:

[\u00A0-\uD7FF\uF900-\uFDCF\uFDF0-\uFFEF]

What are those codes named and where can I find the right values?
I would like to use these into following function:

function val_alpha_it(str) {
    var re = /[^A-Za-z]/
    return re.test(str);                
}

Answer 1

If the encoding works fine for your script, you can just put the characters in the negative set in the regular epxression:

function val_alpha_it(str) {
  return /[^A-Za-zàèéìòóù]/.test(str);
}

If you need to specify the characters using character codes, those are unicode code points. You can look them up in the Unicode character set. The character à for example has character code 00E0, so you write that as \u00E0. So, with character code escapes, the code would be:

function val_alpha_it(str) {
  return /[^A-Za-z\u00E0\u00E8\u00E9\u00EC\u00F2\u00F3\u00F9]/.test(str);
}

Answer 2

Here's a good tutorial on Unicode in Regex: http://www.regular-expressions.info/unicode.html

As you mentioned, JavaScript only supports the \xFFFF style syntax, and that page lists the various ranges of characters.

If you need a specific character, you can use Character Map on Windows to lookup Unicode character codes (look for the U+FFFF in the bottom left, and change to the syntax above).