Unicode character properties

Since 5.1.0, three additional escape sequences to match generic character types are available when UTF-8 mode is selected. They are:

\p{xx}_a character with the xx property\P{xx}a character without the xx property\X_an extended Unicode sequence

The property names represented by xx above are limited to the Unicode general category properties. Each character has exactly one such property, specified by a two-letter abbreviation. For compatibility with Perl, negation can be specified by including a circumflex between the opening brace and the property name. For example, \p{^Lu} is the same as \P{Lu}.

If only one letter is specified with \p or \P, it includes all the properties that start with that letter. In this case, in the absence of negation, the curly brackets in the escape sequence are optional; these two examples have the same effect:

\p{L}
\pL

Property	Matches	Notes
C	Other
Cc	Control
Cf	Format
Cn	Unassigned
Co	Private use
Cs	Surrogate
L	Letter	Includes the following properties: Ll, Lm, Lo, Lt and Lu.
Ll	Lower case letter
Lm	Modifier letter
Lo	Other letter
Lt	Title case letter
Lu	Upper case letter
M	Mark
Mc	Spacing mark
Me	Enclosing mark
Mn	Non-spacing mark
N	Number
Nd	Decimal number
Nl	Letter number
No	Other number
P	Punctuation
Pc	Connector punctuation
Pd	Dash punctuation
Pe	Close punctuation
Pf	Final punctuation
Pi	Initial punctuation
Po	Other punctuation
Ps	Open punctuation
S	Symbol
Sc	Currency symbol
Sk	Modifier symbol
Sm	Mathematical symbol
So	Other symbol
Z	Separator
Zl	Line separator
Zp	Paragraph separator
Zs	Space separator

Extended properties such as InMusicalSymbols are not supported by PCRE.

Specifying case-insensitive (caseless) matching does not affect these escape sequences. For example, \p{Lu} always matches only upper case letters.

Sets of Unicode characters are defined as belonging to certain scripts. A character from one of these sets can be matched using a script name. For example:

\p{Greek}

\P{Han}

Those that are not part of an identified script are lumped together as Common. The current list of scripts is:

Arabic	Armenian	Avestan	Balinese	Bamum
Batak	Bengali	Bopomofo	Brahmi	Braille
Buginese	Buhid	Canadian_Aboriginal	Carian	Chakma
Cham	Cherokee	Common	Coptic	Cuneiform
Cypriot	Cyrillic	Deseret	Devanagari	Egyptian_Hieroglyphs
Ethiopic	Georgian	Glagolitic	Gothic	Greek
Gujarati	Gurmukhi	Han	Hangul	Hanunoo
Hebrew	Hiragana	Imperial_Aramaic	Inherited	Inscriptional_Pahlavi
Inscriptional_Parthian	Javanese	Kaithi	Kannada	Katakana
Kayah_Li	Kharoshthi	Khmer	Lao	Latin
Lepcha	Limbu	Linear_B	Lisu	Lycian
Lydian	Malayalam	Mandaic	Meetei_Mayek	Meroitic_Cursive
Meroitic_Hieroglyphs	Miao	Mongolian	Myanmar	New_Tai_Lue
Nko	Ogham	Old_Italic	Old_Persian	Old_South_Arabian
Old_Turkic	Ol_Chiki	Oriya	Osmanya	Phags_Pa
Phoenician	Rejang	Runic	Samaritan	Saurashtra
Sharada	Shavian	Sinhala	Sora_Sompeng	Sundanese
Syloti_Nagri	Syriac	Tagalog	Tagbanwa	Tai_Le
Tai_Tham	Tai_Viet	Takri	Tamil	Telugu
Thaana	Thai	Tibetan	Tifinagh	Ugaritic
Vai	Yi

The \X escape matches a Unicode extended grapheme cluster. An extended grapheme cluster is one or more Unicode characters that combine to form a single glyph. In effect, this can be thought of as the Unicode equivalent of . as it will match one composed character, regardless of how many individual characters are actually used to render it.

In versions of PCRE older than 8.32 (which corresponds to PHP versions before 5.4.14 when using the bundled PCRE library), \X is equivalent to (?>\PM\pM*). That is, it matches a character without the "mark" property, followed by zero or more characters with the "mark" property, and treats the sequence as an atomic group (see below). Characters with the "mark" property are typically accents that affect the preceding character.

Matching characters by Unicode property is not fast, because PCRE has to search a structure that contains data for over fifteen thousand characters. That is why the traditional escape sequences such as \d and \w do not use Unicode properties in PCRE.

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