Regex for European name

Question

I'm looking for a Regex for European name. I found this one, works good with javascript:

/^([ \u00c0-\u01ffa-zA-Z'\-])+$/

I convert it for PHP, but it doesn't work:

/^([ \x{00C0}-\x{01FF}a-zA-Z'\-])+$/

My regex must match with name like that:

Jean-Paul le Marchant

Jérôme L'activé

So characters a-zA-Z, no special chars like @#$%^© etc. but all accented/european characters like éèàôç etc.

I suppose you also need `'` even though it is a "special character"? — djechlin, Nov 27 '12 at 15:26
Why would you do this? Maybe you can prevent someone from entering 'J0hn', but they still can enter a name like 'oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo'. You're never going to stop malicious input with a regex check. And since you apparently support unicode already, don't worry about anything anyone enters. Maybe someone *is* called 'John Doe the 3rd' or 也许明年. Why block it? (Sorry if I've offended any Chinese people.) — GolezTrol, Nov 27 '12 at 16:17

score 5 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 27 '12 at 15:26

You need to activate Unicode mode for these escape sequences to work:

/^([ \x{00C0}-\x{01FF}a-zA-Z'\-])+$/u

Note that the parentheses are not necessary:

/^[ \x{00C0}-\x{01FF}a-zA-Z'\-]+$/u

A character class gives a single "element" of your regex that can be repeate with a quantifier immediately.

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Nov 27 '12 at 15:26

0

Make sure you use utf8 encoding and then slap the u modifier on the regex:

$regex = '/^([ \x{00C0}-\x{01FF}a-zA-Z\'\-])+$/u';

answered Nov 27 '12 at 15:26

Esailija

anubhava · Answer 3 · 2012-11-27T15:35:32.163

0

This PHP regex should work:

$str = "Jérôme L'activé";
if (preg_match("/^[\s\x{00C0}-\x{01FF}a-z'-]+$/iu", $str, $match))
   print_r($match);

OUTPUT:

Array
(
    [0] => Jérôme L'activé
)

RegEx Flags

PS: Inside square brackets you don't need to escape hyphen - if it is at first or last place.

edited Nov 27 '12 at 15:35

answered Nov 27 '12 at 15:29

anubhava

@m.buettner: Thanks, That is right and I corrected my note. – anubhava Nov 27 '12 at 15:35

3 Answers3