Question

Because of JavaScript’s initial simplistic implementation and the fact that this simplistic approach was later set in stone as standard behavior, JavaScript’s regular expressions are rather dumb about characters that do not appear in the English language. For example, as far as JavaScript’s regular expressions are concerned, a “word character” is only one of the 26 characters in the Latin alphabet (uppercase or lowercase) and, for some reason, the underscore character. Things like é or β, which most definitely are word characters, will not match \w (and will match uppercase \W , the nonword category).

By a strange historical accident, \s (whitespace) does not have this problem and matches all characters that the Unicode standard considers whitespace, including things like the nonbreaking space and the Mongolian vowel separator.

Some regular expression implementations in other programming languages have syntax to match specific Unicode character categories, such as “all uppercase letters”, “all punctuation”, or “control characters”. There are plans to add support for such categories JavaScript, but it unfortunately looks like they won’t be realized in the near future.

This is a book about getting computers to do what you want them to do. Computers are about as common as screwdrivers today, but they contain a lot more hidden complexity and thus are harder to operate and understand. To many, they remain alien, slightly threatening things.