How to get correct first letter in a tamil unicode word using Javascript?

Question

Edit 2:

const tamilRegex = XRegExp("\\p{Tamil}", "ug")
const match = XRegExp.exec(word, tamilRegex);
return match

Now, I found XRegExp a library which can handle unicode characters. The above code is the one I tried using that library still it returns wrong value.

Any help?!

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Edit 1:

const word = "யாத்திராகமம்"
const firstLetter = word.match(/[^\w]/u)

console.log(firstLetter)

The above code returns ய which is not the correct first tamil letter in that word, instead it should be யா.

Any way to get the proper first letter in a word using regex or any other library?

Answer 1

I don't know the Tamil script, but Wikipedia explains the concept of compound letters in that script. The Tamil Unicode Block has characters in the range U+0B80 to U+0BFF, of which the subrange U+0BBE-U+0BCD, and one at U+0BD7 are suffixes that need to be combined with the preceding consonant to make it a compound letter.

Without any specialised library or smarter regex support, it seems you can make it work with the regex [\u0b80-\u0bff][\u0bbe-\u0bcd\u0bd7]?, which matches a character in the Tamil range, and in addition possibly one of those suffix codes.

let s = "this is Tamil: யாத்திராகமம்";

console.log("First Tamil character: ", s.match(/[\u0b80-\u0bff][\u0bbe-\u0bcd\u0bd7]?/u));