Hope Watched words adds support for non-English characters

zogstrip · February 16, 2026, 2:45pm

Thanks for the report, this will be fixed by

github.com/discourse/discourse

FIX: support CJK and spaceless scripts in watched word boundaries (#37844)

main ← fix/watched-words-cjk-boundaries

merged 05:04PM - 16 Feb 26 UTC

ZogStriP

+84 -9

Watched words failed to match in CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) and other space…less scripts because word boundary detection relied on whitespace or non-word characters. Languages like Chinese don't use spaces between words, so "测试" inside "这是一个测试文本" was never matched. Introduce a SPACELESS_SCRIPTS constant covering Han, Hiragana, Katakana, Hangul, Thai, Lao, Myanmar, Khmer, and Tibetan Unicode ranges. Update `match_word_regexp` for both Ruby and JS engines so that characters from these scripts are treated as word boundaries. This allows a CJK watched word to match when surrounded by other CJK characters, and a Latin watched word to match when adjacent to CJK text (e.g., "Test" in "我的Test很好"), while still preventing partial Latin matches (e.g., "Testing" does not match "Test"). Also fix the admin watched word testing modal to use `RegExp.exec()` with capture group extraction instead of `String.match()`, since the new boundary patterns include a leading consuming group. Remove the outdated "non-chrome browsers do not support lookbehind" comment — all major browsers have supported lookbehind since 2023. https://meta.discourse.org/t/71288 https://meta.discourse.org/t/396109

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Hope Watched words adds support for non-English characters

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