Detecting non european characters

Question

I need to prevent my users from entering non-european characters in a text box.

For example, here's how I disallow Cyrillic:

$('.test').keyup(function(e) {
        var toTest = $(this).val();
        var rforeign = /[\u0400-\u04FF]/i;
        if (rforeign.test(toTest)) {
            alert("No cyrillic allowed");
            $(this).val('');
        } 
    });

But I also need to exclude Arabic, Japanese, and so on.

I just want to allow:

ASCII English, standard characters
Italian accented letters: à è ì ò ù á é í ó ú
other special characters from European languages: French, German...

Is there a way to do that with ranges?

I tried /[\u0400-\u04FF]/i but it just allows ASCII English (not Italian for example).

I think you need to define "Europe". Cyrillic scripts are used in a handful of European countries, so where exactly are you drawing the line? Do you consider Iceland to be a part of Europe? — Tim Pietzcker, Apr 17 '15 at 07:42
What about Arabic numerals...? There are several on this very page... — deceze, Apr 17 '15 at 08:08

Fabrizio Calderan · Accepted Answer · 2020-05-10T06:19:01.237

6

Just allow unicode symbols in some given ranges, e.g.

/^[a-z\u00C0-\u00F6\u00F8-\u017E]+$/i

Example fiddle: https://jsfiddle.net/4y6e6bj5/3/

This regular expression allows basic latin / latin extended A (diacritics and accented letters). It excludes any other alphabet/symbol.

If you need to allow other specific unicode symbols, look at the unicode table and insert as many ranges as you need into the regular expression

edited May 10 '20 at 06:19

answered Apr 17 '15 at 07:32

Fabrizio Calderan

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While this work perfectly, it does not detect non european characters as much as detect non-non european characters. – Docteur Apr 17 '15 at 07:37
this is not working... I replaced your regex in my code and still am able to type ية or Ф without any alert! – Fabio B. Apr 17 '15 at 07:39
ok thank you, I just needed to check the negative match, it works. what if I need to allow punctuation and white spaces too? – Fabio B. Apr 17 '15 at 07:56
as you can see from the unicode table I've linked punctuation is in unicode range `\u0020-\002F`. Include it in the regexp. – Fabrizio Calderan Apr 17 '15 at 07:58
I had XML containing a bunch of bidirectional characters (Arabic and Hebrew), as well as Tamil characters, produced in error via OCR. I found them using [\u0590-\u1000]. – Will Hanley May 11 '20 at 15:03

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 17 '15 at 07:31

0

Use a negative set :

[^A-Za-zàèìòùáéíóú(othercharacters..)]

answered Apr 17 '15 at 07:31

Docteur

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Detecting non european characters

2 Answers2