Regular expression to search for Gadaffi

Easy... (Qadaffi|Khadafy|Qadafi|...)... it's self-documented, maintainable, and assuming your regexp engine is actually a regexp engine, will compile to the same DFA that the obfuscated garbage in the SO solutions will compile to.<p>Writing compact regular expressions is like using short variable names to speed up a program. It only helps if your compiler is brain-dead.

Isn't it strange that there is no official transcription for Arab names?<p>Chinese, Japanese and Korean used to have a transcription by language (i.e. a transcription for the English language, another one for the french), but that got standardized, and now there is only one transcription for each word (except of course names that became really common: Peking in English, Pékin in French, Beijing in the now official pinyin transcription). Is it because the Arab language is separated in so many countries without a centralised system to "manage" the language?

(G310|K310|Q310)<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soundex" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soundex</a><p>I wouldn't expect too many false positives.

while the regexp would find Ghaddafi in all latin script languages even if it's not understood, then let me suggest my Russian as well :)<p>Каддафи<p>btw, it's always written only this way, to the opposite of the Osama bin Laden situation, when some emigrant sources name him as Осама бин Ладен instead of the correct Усама бен Ладен.

Also see <a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/math/6/1/f/61f34aa25871e9546b6a11243e1bed31.png" rel="nofollow">http://upload.wikimedia.org/math/6/1/f/61f34aa25871e9546b6a1...</a>

From the SO page: "I just thought that if the arabic transcription says Qaḏḏāfī, the regex should check for Qaddafi too."<p>Would any of these searches find an article that solely uses a phonetic spelling with diacritical marks as opposed to a "standard" alpha only transliteration?<p>I guess it depends on the engine used - in which case the question is do any regex engines do such automated conversion?

There are over 32 accepted ways of spelling Mu'ammar al-Qadhafi. Here's a dance song to help you remember just a few of them: <a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/danilic/gaddafi-the-duck-sauce-remix-1o3k" rel="nofollow">http://www.buzzfeed.com/danilic/gaddafi-the-duck-sauce-remix...</a>