Vista - Replace special characters with regular expression

Hi,
I am trying to write a function that receives strings from all unicode
characters - and replaces all special characters (!@#$%^&*()><?...)
with "-", but leaves literals from all languages as-is.
I've tried to use regular expression with all special chars on ASCII
table - but it still doesn't cover everything.
I cannot use a "whitelist" (literals that are allowed) instead of a
"blacklist" (special chars NOT allowed) - because I don't know the
letters of all languages I'd like to support (English, German, French,
Chinese, Hebrew, Arabic...).
Any ideas what I can do?

This is my "black list" regular expression code - but it does not
succeed always...
There are still special characters with "pass through" the regexp:

dim oreg_exp
set oreg_exp = new RegExp
oreg_exp.Pattern = "([{}\(\)\^$&._%#!@=<>:;,~`'\’ \*\?\/\+\|\[\
\\\]|\]|\-)"
oreg_exp.IgnoreCase = true
oreg_exp.global = true
title = oreg_exp.replace (title,"-")
Set oreg_exp = Nothing

I've been offered to use
oreg_exp.Pattern = "[^\w]" - but this doesn't support international
characters, only ASCII chars.

Thanks,
Gabi.

"Gabriela" <frohlinger@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:545da651-19dc-48b3-b6f7-7b9cf05544b1@xxxxxx
Hi,
I am trying to write a function that receives strings from all unicode
characters - and replaces all special characters (!@#$%^&*()><?...)
with "-", but leaves literals from all languages as-is.
I've tried to use regular expression with all special chars on ASCII
table - but it still doesn't cover everything.
I cannot use a "whitelist" (literals that are allowed) instead of a
"blacklist" (special chars NOT allowed) - because I don't know the
letters of all languages I'd like to support (English, German, French,
Chinese, Hebrew, Arabic...).
Any ideas what I can do?

This is my "black list" regular expression code - but it does not
succeed always...
There are still special characters with "pass through" the regexp:

dim oreg_exp
set oreg_exp = new RegExp
oreg_exp.Pattern = "([{}\(\)\^$&._%#!@=<>:;,~`'\’ \*\?\/\+\|\[\
\\\]|\]|\-)"
oreg_exp.IgnoreCase = true
oreg_exp.global = true
title = oreg_exp.replace (title,"-")
Set oreg_exp = Nothing

I've been offered to use
oreg_exp.Pattern = "[^\w]" - but this doesn't support international
characters, only ASCII chars.

Thanks,
Gabi.

I think you are saying that you can't make a white list because there are
just too many charsets/countrycodes/languages/Locales/LCIDs. And your
current blacklist is insufficient. Can you give us some specific examples
of special characters it doesn't catch -- the LCID and the Unicode code
point (number between 0 and 65535) so that we can research this a little.
If you use a script to get the code point, be sure to use the AscW function
rather than Asc. Asc can only return an 8-bit number execpt in a few
locales like Maltese.

-Paul Randall