php validate if string is alphabetic including cyrillic, greek or any unicode letter

Question

I am trying to validate string is alphabetic including multiple character sets:

function is_string($str){
    return preg_match("/^[a-zA-Z\p{Cyrillic}\p{Cyrillic}]+$/u", $str) ? TRUE : FALSE;
}

but it fails if string contains some other characters of different languages (ç, ë are used in albanian language)

is_string('ç');//false
is_string('ë');//false

Is there any general function or something which will fix this problem for any character set?

user3942918 · Accepted Answer · 2014-09-16T08:20:10.483

4

\p{L}\p{M}* matches any letter including diacritics (if any.)

edited Sep 16 '14 at 08:20

answered Aug 15 '14 at 15:34

user3942918

Great thing, thank you very much :) I tested it a little and look great, can you tell me what \p{L} means? – Sabri Aziri Aug 15 '14 at 15:40
This is a fantastic resource on this topic: [Unicode Regular Expressions](http://www.regular-expressions.info/unicode.html) – Parapluie May 10 '17 at 17:39

1 Answers1