Chanukah Regex

Question

Hannuka, Chanukah, Hanukkah...Due to transliteration from another language and character set, there are many ways to spell the name of this holiday. How many legitimate spellings can you come up with?

Now, write a regular expression that will recognise all of them.

Answer 1

/^[ck]?hann?ukk?ah?$/i

Answer 2

I think the only approved spellings in English are Hanukkah and Chanukh, so it's something like

/(Ch|H)anuk?kah/

Or maybe even better

/(Chanukah|Hanukkah)/

Answer 3

Call me a sucker for readability.

In Python:

def find_hanukkah(s):
   import re

   spellings = ['hannukah', 'channukah', 'hanukkah'] # etc...

   for m in re.finditer('|'.join(spellings), s, re.I):
      print m.group()



find_hanukkah("Hannukah Channukah, Hanukkah")

Answer 4

According to http://www.holidays.net/chanukah/spelling.htm, it can be spelled any of the following ways:

Chanuka
Chanukah
Chanukkah
Channukah
Hanukah
Hannukah
Hanukkah
Hanuka
Hanukka
Hanaka
Haneka
Hanika
Khanukkah

Here is my regex that matches all of them:

/(Ch|H|Kh)ann?[aeiu]kk?ah?/

Edit: Or this, without branches:

/[CHK]h?ann?[aeiu]kk?ah?/

Answer 5

I like Triptych's answer, but i would take it one step forward... also in python:

def valid(spelling):
    import re

    regex_spelling = re.compile(r'^[cCkK]{0,1}han{1,2}uk{1,2}ah$')
    valid = regex_spelling.match(spelling)

    if valid:
        print 'Valid spelling'
    else:
        print spelling, " is not a spelling for the word"

to use it:

valid("hanukkah")

Answer 6

Something like C?hann?uk?kah? matches most of the common cases. There also a bunch of weirder spellings C?hann?uk?kah?|Han[aei]ka|Khanukkah matches almost every spelling I could think of (that had at least half a million hits on google).

Answer 7

luckily I understand Hebrew - חנוכה