Regex for word characters in any language

Question

Testing the PHP regex engine, I see that it considers only [0-9A-Za-z_] to be word characters. Letters of non-ASCII languages, such as Hebrew, are not matched as word characters with [\w]. Are there any PHP or Perl regex escape sequences which will match a letter in any language? I could add ranges for each alphabet that I expect to be used, but users will always surprise us with unexpected languages!

Note that this is not for security filtering but rather for tokenizing a text.

Answer 1

Try [\pL_] - see the reference at

http://php.net/manual/en/regexp.reference.unicode.php

Answer 2

Try \p{L}. It matches any kind of letter from any language. If you don't want to use char set [].