Regex wordwrap with UTF8 characters in JS

Question

Hi everybody,
i've already read all tha articles in here wich touch a similar problem but still don't get any solution working. In my case i wanna 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 do'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 :-( BTW did i mention that i hate regular expressions ;-)

Thank You very much!

Answer 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>");