Matching a border of a russian word with \b

Question

Is this a bug or am I doing something wrong (when trying to match Russian swear words in a multiplayer game chat log) on CentOS 6.5 with the stock perl 5.10.1?

# echo блядь | perl -ne 'print if /\bбля/'

# echo блядь | perl -ne 'print if /бля/'
блядь

# echo $LANG
en_US.UTF-8

Why doesn't the first command print anything?

What about `u` Unicode [modifier](http://perldoc.perl.org/perlre.html#Modifiers) `'print if /\bбля/u'` not familiar with perl, just a guess. — Jonny 5, Sep 26 '14 at 07:39
Unfortunately `/u` doesn't work: *Bareword found where operator expected at -e line 1, near "/\bхуй/u"* — Alexander Farber, Sep 26 '14 at 07:41

score 4 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 26 '14 at 07:42

4

You have to tell Perl that the source code contains UTF-8 (use utf8), and that the input (-CI) and output (-CO) are UTF-8 encoded:

echo 'помёт' | perl -CIO -ne 'use utf8; print if /\bпомё/'

answered Sep 26 '14 at 07:42

choroba

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Great answer! I am sysadmining several Russian servers and wondered for years, why my perl oneliners didn't work at the CLI – Alexander Farber Sep 26 '14 at 07:57
2

wondering why not `-CS` (with stderr too) e.g. `perl -Mutf8 -CS -ne` it is shorter :) :) – clt60 Sep 26 '14 at 10:15

Matching a border of a russian word with \b

1 Answers1