note graff Larry Wall recently posted this nifty little script on the perl-unicode mail list -- here it is, pretty much verbatim (I added the "S" on the shebang line, to make STDIN/STDOUT/STDERR be utf8): <code> #!/usr/bin/perl -CS $pat = shift; if (ord $pat > 256) { $pat = sprintf("%04x", ord $pat); } elsif (ord $pat > 128) { # arg in sneaky UTF-8 $pat = sprintf("%04x", unpack("U0U",$pat)); } @names = split /^/, do 'unicore/Name.pl'; for (@names) { if (/$pat/io) { $hex = hex($_); print chr($hex),"\t",$_; } } </code> The idea is to output a list of unicode code points (if any) that match any given expression you put into <code> $ARGV[0] </code> -- here's a relevant command-line usage example (Larry had this script in a file named "uni"): <code> uni "latin (?:small|capital) letter A with" </code> (update: if you try this, you'll want to be running in a terminal window that handles utf8 characters!) <P> So, all you need for what you want is the part that assigns the output of "unicode/Name.pl" to an array -- this gives you the unicode character database -- and grep through the array to get the set of vowels you want. Then, put the first token (first character in each array element is the utf8 character itself) into a character-class expression. Something like: <code> my @names = split/^/, do 'unicore/Name.pl'; #... my @vowelsets; for my $v ( qw/A E I O U/ ) { push( @vowelsets, join( '', map { chr hex( substr $_, 0, 4 ) } grep /LATIN (?:SMALL|CAPITAL) LETTER $v/, @names )); } # now you can use each element of @vowelsets as a character class # (similiarly for consonants...) </code> (updated this snippet: changed the map block from a regex to substr; updated a second time to use "chr hex()" in the map block -- each element of @names begins with a four-digit hex code-point value, which needs to be converted to a character.) <P> Still a bit cumbersome, I suppose, but quite manageable and not that bulky. 416513 416513