C# Regex - How to parse string for Swedish letters åäöÅÄÖ?

Question

I'm trying to parse an HTML file for strings in this format:

<a href="/userinfo/userinfo.aspx?ID=305157" target="main">MyUsername</a> O22</td>

I want to retrieve the information where "305157", "MyUsername" and the first letter in "O22" (which can be either T, K or O).

I'm using this regex; <a href="/userinfo/userinfo\.aspx\?ID=\d*" target="helgonmain">\w*</a> \w\d\d and it works fine, as long as there aren't any åäöÅÄÖ's where the "\w" are.

What should I do?

Answer 1

You can use \p{L} to match any 'letter', which will support all letters in all languages, as suggested in this SO question.

Or, you can simply replace \w* with [^<]*, to match all characters that are not the opening of an HTML tag.

But as said by others, parsing HTML using regex is a first step towards insanity...

Answer 2

Firstly: DON'T USE REGULAR EXPRESSIONS TO PARSE HTML. USE AN HTML PARSER.

Secondly: if you really want to do this (and you don't) then instead of \w you could match any character apart from '<':

<a href="/userinfo/userinfo\.aspx\?ID=\d*" target="helgonmain">[^<]*</a> \w\d\d

Answer 3

You can use a character class which specifically includes those things:

[\wåäöÅÄÖ]*

Or you can use the Unicode character class for letters:

\p{L}

or specifically for Latin:

\p{InBasicLatin}