Python's \b is a \w/non-\w transition. Devanagari vowel signs (matras)
like ा ी ु are Unicode category Mc (Mark, Spacing Combining) — not \w.
This means \b splits mid-word on every matra: names like अनीता (Anita)
truncate to अनीत, and person-verb patterns like \bराज\s+ने\s+कहा\b
never match because \b fails after the final matra of कहा.
Same issue affects Arabic, Hebrew, Thai, Tamil, and every other script
whose words contain combining marks.
Fix: locales with combining-mark scripts declare a boundary_chars field
in their entity section (e.g. "\\w\\u0900-\\u097F" for Hindi). The i18n
loader replaces every \b in that locale's patterns with a script-aware
lookaround that treats the declared characters as "inside-word", and
pre-wraps candidate/multi_word patterns with the same boundary.
Default behavior (no boundary_chars) keeps standard \b — en, pt-br, ru,
it are unchanged.
Changes:
- mempalace/i18n/__init__.py: add _script_boundary, _expand_b,
_wrap_candidate, _collect_entity_section; candidate_patterns are now
returned fully-wrapped (boundary + capture group applied)
- mempalace/entity_detector.py: extract_candidates compiles pre-wrapped
candidate patterns directly instead of re-wrapping with \b
- tests/test_entity_detector.py: 5 new tests for Devanagari boundaries
(name extraction with/without boundary_chars, person-verb firing,
English regression)
Igor Lins e Silva
f895bc58e6