Re: [Boost-users] Regex Localization problem

From: John Maddock (john_at_[hidden])
Date: 2006-05-17 05:23:01

Antonio Scotti wrote:
> Hi,
>  I have a portability problem with regex (probably due to localization
> issues).
>
> I've found that, under Win32, the regular expression "\w" matches all
> the alphanumeric chars, including non ascii ones (such as e grave or
> e acute). This doesn't hold while under linux. In fact, \w only seems
> to match ascii characters. I've tried chancing the locale, but
> nothing changed.
> Is there a way to make \w have on linux the same behaviour it has on
> win32?

Sure, it all comes down to what the default C++ locale is:

std::locale::global(std::locale("en_US"));

called before any regexes are constructed would set the locale to "en_US" 
*provided that locale is supported by your implementation*.

Alternatively, you can set the locale in specific regex instances:

boost::regex e;
e.imbue(std::locale("en_US"));
e.assign(my_regular_expression);  // now uses en_US as it's locale

HTH, John.