[Indic-computing-devel] Regexp and Indian languages ?

[Arun S. <ar...@sh...>]

So I was thinking about how one would go about using regular expressions
with an Indian language while I was brushing my teeth this morning.

The current syntax seems to be "character" oriented. For eg, f.o matches foo.
However, if I want to write a regexp such as:

su . la .

that matches 

su bbu la xmi 

we need to introduce a new concept of a syllable into the regexp
syntax. For eg: "_" might mean one syllable as opposed to "." which
means one character.

In other words "su_la_" would match subbulaxmi. This simple minded
proposal would mean that the zillions of existing regexps which use
"_" without suspecting it to be a special character would be broken.

This might be a good undergrad project for the linguistically inclined
(and hence the crosspost to Linux and BSD mailing lists which often get
such queries).

If there is existing literature on this topic, I'd love to find out more.

	-Arun