This talk discusses the future of Ruby regular expressions. Ruby allows matching characters with many Unicode properties. The 'name' property is special, and requires special treatment. Unicode character names are different for each character and up to 80 or more characters long.

We show how we can use the structure of the names to produce a compact representation of the data that can be efficiently searched. The solution relies on tries and radix trees as data structures, and care to try to use every single bit of memory. We compare memory requirements and speed with implementations for other languages such as Python, Perl, and Java.