How to match Cyrillic characters with a regular expression

How do I match French and Russian Cyrillic alphabet characters with a regular expression? I only want to do the alpha characters, no numbers or special characters. Right now I have

[A-Za-z]

11 Answers

If your regex flavor supports Unicode blocks ([\p{IsCyrillic}]), you can match Cyrillic characters with:

[\p{IsCyrillic}] or [\p{Cyrillic}] 

Otherwise try using:

[U+0400–U+04FF] 

For PHP use:

[\x{0400}-\x{04FF}] 

Explanation:

[\p{IsCyrillic}] Match a character from the Unicode block "Cyrillic" (U+0400–U+04FF) «[\p{IsCyrillic}]» 

Note:

Unicode Characters list and Numeric HTML Entities of [U+0400–U+04FF] .

It depends on your regex flavor. If it supports Unicode character classes (like .NET, for instance), \p{L} matches a letter character (in any character set).

To match only Russian Cyrillic characters use:

[\u0401\u0451\u0410-\u044f] 

which is the equivalent of:

[ЁёА-я] 

where А is Cyrillic, not Latin. (Despite looking the same they have different codes)

\p{IsCyrillic}, \p{Cyrillic}, [\u0400-\u04FF] which others suggested will match all variants of Cyrillic, not only Russian

If you use modern PHP version - just:

preg_match("/^[\p{L}]+$/u"); 

Don't forget the u flag for unicode support!

Regex to match cyrillic alphabets with normal(english) alphabets :

^[A-Za-z.!@?#"$%&:;() *\+,\/;\-=[\\\]\^_{|}<>\u0400-\u04FF]*$ 

It matches special chars,cyrillic alphabets,english alphabets.

Various regex dialects use [:alpha:] for any alphanumeric character in the current locale. (You may need to put that in a character class, e.g. [[:alpha:]].)

this worked for me

[a-z\u0400-\u04FF] 

If you use Elixir:

String.match?(string, ~r/^\p{Cyrillic}*$/u) 

You need to add the u flag for unicode support.

You can use the first and the last letter. For example in Bulgarian:

[А-я]+ 

For modern PHP (source):

$string = 'тест тест Тест Обязателльно Stackoverflow >!<'; var_dump(preg_replace('/[\x{0410}-\x{042F}]+.*[\x{0410}-\x{042F}]+/iu', '', $string)); 

In Java to match Cyrillic letters and space use the following pattern

^[\p{InCyrillic}\s]+$