title: Testing for word characters in Ruby/Rails regular expressions for all languages
body: <p>I know I can match a word character with <code>\w</code> in Ruby's regular expressions:</p>
  
  <pre><code>2.0.0p247 :003 &gt; /[\w]+/.match('hi')                                                                                                                                               
   =&gt; #&lt;MatchData "hi"&gt;                                                                                                                                                              
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>However, as I understand, that only matches <code>[a-zA-Z0-9_]</code>. I'd like to also match characters that appear in standard words in other languages. Is there an easy way to do this?</p>
  
  <p><em><strong>UPDATE</em></strong>: Seems like I may have found my answer in the POSIX bracket expressions:</p>
  
  <pre><code>/[[:alnum:]]/ - Alphabetic and numeric character
  /[[:alpha:]]/ - Alphabetic character
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Is this what I'm looking for?</p>