Regex for international character sets like [a-zA-Z] + �, Ł, �, etc.

Question

Hi all!
Is there an internationalized equivalent for the pattern "[a-zA-Z]+" which would accept the French, German, Polish or other local characters like "Ł" or "�" or "�"?
It's a bad idea to add all of them to the standard regex like "[a-zA-Z���Ł��]+", since you never know what comes next.
I tried to use the "\\p{Alpha}+" to check the string "Łukasz", but the string didn't match. Is there any other possibility other than to exclude "=", ">", "+", "�", etc.?
Thanks for any help!
Lena

Answer 1

My application will get the UTF-8 encoded string and
has to ensure it represents a valid name.There is no such thing as a "utf-8 encoded string." In Java strings are internally encoded in one of the 16-bit tranformation formats but you don't need to know this most of the time.
The code you post works accidentally. It does not work in the general case. Just do what I said in my previous post.
Try this code for instance:System.out.println(Charset.forName("UTF-8").encode(">8<>")
                     .asCharBuffer().toString().matches("\\p{L}+"));It will print "true" because the resulting charbuffer does match the pattern even though the original string does not. To understand why this happens I recommend reading the API documentation of the relevant classes.