I'm trying to make a dynamic regex that matches a persons name. It works without problems on most names, until I ran into accented characters at the end of the name. Example: Some Fancy Namé The regex I've used so far is: /\b(Fancy Namé|Namé)\b/i Used like this: "Goal: Some Fancy Namé. Awesome.".replace(/\b(Fancy Namé|Namé)\b/i, '<a href="#">$1</a>'); This simply won't match. If I replace the é with a e, it matches just fine. If I try to match a name such as "Some Fancy Naméa", it works just fine. If I remove the word last word boundary anchor, it works just fine. Why doesn't the word boundary flag work here? Any suggestions on how I would get around this problem? I have concidered using something like this, but I'm not sure what the performance penalties would be like: "Some fancy namé. Allow me to ellaborate.".replace(/([\s.,!?])(fancy namé|namé)([\s.,!?]|$)/g, '$1<a href="#">$2</a>$3') Suggestions? Ideas?