Regular Expression Pocket Reference, 2nd Edition

Unicode Support

PCRE provides basic Unicode 5.0 support. When a pattern is compiled with the PCRE_UTF8 flag, the pattern will run on Unicode text. However, PCRE determines case and the property of being a letter or a digit based on a set of default tables. You can supply an alternate set of tables based on a different locale. For example:

setlocale(LC_CTYPE, "fr");
tables = pcre_maketables( );
re = pcre_compile(..., tables);