Multi-Character Escape

Provides a simple way to identify a commonly used set of characters.

Syntax

MultiCharEsc ::= '.' | ('\' [sSiIcCdDwW])

Character Sequence	Equivalent character class
.	[^\n\r]
\s	[#x20\t\n\r]
\S	[^\s]
\i	The set of initial name characters, those matched by Letter \| '_' \| ';'.
\I	[^\i]
\c	The set of name characters, those matched by NameChar.
\C	[^\c]
\d	\p{Nd}
\D	[^\d]
\w	[#x0000=#x10FFFF]-[\p{P}\p{Z}\p{C}] (all characters except the set of punctuation, separator, and other characters)
\W	[^\w]

Note
The regular expression language defined here does not attempt to provide a general solution to regular expressions over the Universal Character Set (UCS) character sequences. The language is targeted at the support of "Level 1" features as defined in the Unicode Regular Expressions Guidelines (http://www.unicode.org/unicode/reports/tr18/).