There is a Unicode mode in JavaScript regular expressions

Unicode is such an interesting topic, and it feels like there are new things to discover every day. Today was one of these days. I was reading a blog post and came across the u flag. I haven't seen this regular expression flag, and I found myself reading Axel's chapter in "Exploring ES6" on that topic.

So what's this u flag?

In JavaScript, we've got the "problem" that strings are represented in UTF-16 which means that not every character can be represented with a single code unit. This behavior leads to weird length properties of certain strings, and it becomes tricky when you deal with surrogate pairs.

In short: surrogate pairs are two Unicode code units representing a single character.

Should the period (.) in regular expressions (.) match a character that needs two code units then? This is where the u flag comes into play.

Let's have a look at an example:

const emoji = '\u{1F60A}'; // "smiling face with smiling eyes" / "😊"
emoji.length               // 2 -> it's a surrogate pair
/^.$/.test(emoji)          // false
/^.$/u.test(emoji)         // true

The unicode mode (//u) enables the use of code point escape sequences (\u{1F42A}) in regular expressions and they help when dealing with surrogate pairs.

const emoji = '\u{1F42A}';  // "🐪"
/\u{1F42A}/.test(emoji);    // false
/\uD83D\uDC2A/.test(camel); // true
/\u{1F42A}/u.test(emoji);   // true

Unicode mode helps deal with Unicode in Regular Expressions. Read Axel's book chapter or Mathias Bynens' article on the topic if you want to learn more. Have fun!