Detect Russian / cyrillic in Javascript string?

Question

I'm trying to detect if a string contains Russian (cyrillic) characters or not. I'm using this code:

term.match(/[\wа-я]+/ig);

but it doesn't work – or in fact it just returns the string back as it is.

Can somebody help with the right code?

Thanks!

Echidna

You include \w in the regular expression, so it matches words with Latin characters as well. – Azoic

Answer 1

Perhaps you meant to use the RegExp test method instead?

/[а-яА-ЯЁё]/.test(term)

Note that JavaScript regexes are not really Unicode-aware, which means the i flag will have no effect on anything that's not ASCII. Hence the need for spelling out lower- and upper-case ranges separately.

Camilla

You might want to add Ёё since they are also used in Russian. – Exorable

the cyrillic unicode range doens't work, but the other method works great – Echidna

This answers means you have to store your .js files as unicode. Hmm. – Butte

@cymro, or use Unicode escape within the regex. But storing and transmitting text files as UTF-8 should really be the default nowadays. We're not in the 70s anymore. – Camilla

Joey, thanks for your comment. Storing js files as UTF-8 often adds an unwanted BOM at the beginning. – Butte

Answer 2

Use pattern /[\u0400-\u04FF]/ to cover more cyrillic characters:

// http://jrgraphix.net/r/Unicode/0400-04FF
const cyrillicPattern = /^[\u0400-\u04FF]+$/;

console.log('Привіт:', cyrillicPattern.test('Привіт'));
console.log('Hello:', cyrillicPattern.test('Hello'));

UPDATE:

In some new browsers, you can use Unicode property escapes.

The Cyrillic script uses the same range as described above: U+0400..U+04FF

const cyrillicPattern = /^\p{Script=Cyrillic}+$/u;

console.log('Привіт:', cyrillicPattern.test('Привіт'));
console.log('Hello:', cyrillicPattern.test('Hello'));

Baden

Perfect answer! More character ranges can be found in this format here: kourge.net/projects/regexp-unicode-block – Sperrylite

@Sperrylite Link is not available anymore – Twomey

@Twomey I cannot update my comment but here is the link from Archive.org: web.archive.org/web/20200118100606/http://kourge.net/projects/… – Sperrylite

No spaces or punctuation are working – Gyimah

@NairiAregHatspanyan for spaces and punctuation, extend the pattern with spaces and punctuation. Example: /^[\p{Script=Cyrillic}\s\.\!]+$/u – Baden

@NairiAregHatspanyan and if you need just detect and not match, then: /\p{Script=Cyrillic}/u.test('hello привіт') // true /\p{Script=Cyrillic}/u.test('hello "№%:') // false – Baden