In Regexes§

See primary documentation in context for Unicode properties.

The character classes mentioned so far are mostly for convenience; another approach is to use Unicode character properties. These come in the form <:property>, where property can be a short or long Unicode General Category name. These use pair syntax.

To match against a Unicode property you can use either smartmatch or uniprop:

"a".uniprop('Script');                 # OUTPUT: «Latin␤»
"a" ~~ / <:Script<Latin>> /;           # OUTPUT: «｢a｣␤»
"a".uniprop('Block');                  # OUTPUT: «Basic Latin␤»
"a" ~~ / <:Block('Basic Latin')> /;    # OUTPUT: «｢a｣␤»

These are the Unicode general categories used for matching:

For example, <:Lu> matches a single, uppercase letter.

Its negation is this: <:!property>. So, <:!Lu> matches a single character that is not an uppercase letter.

Categories can be used together, with an infix operator:

To match either a lowercase letter or a number, write <:Ll+:N> or <:Ll+:Number> or <+ :Lowercase_Letter + :Number>.

It's also possible to group categories and sets of categories with parentheses; for example:

say $0 if 'raku9' ~~ /\w+(<:Ll+:N>)/ # OUTPUT: «｢9｣␤»