How to check that string contains letter in any language?

Question

My current regex is /^[a-zA-Z]+( [a-zA-Z]+)*$/. It works for names like:

John Smith

Anyway, the site is international and name could be like this, for example:

Jānis Bērziņš

It's a valid name, but regex will fail to validate it because of ā, ē and š chars.

The one way would be to type all chars that are allowed, but then the list would be HUGE!

I'm looking for easier way to do that. Maybe black-list instead of white-list approach?

Thanks in any advice!

Do you need it just for names? If so, white-list approach should do just fine — Darvex, Feb 16 '12 at 14:25
You shouldn't be trying to validate names in the first place. They can contain many more symbols besides letters. — Tim Pietzcker, Feb 16 '12 at 15:02

score 6 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 16 '12 at 14:26

6

answered Feb 16 '12 at 14:26

1

Something like that. You may want *some* punctuation though (-, ', etc.). – Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams Feb 16 '12 at 14:29

stema · Answer 2 · 2012-02-16T14:47:14.863

2

Just replace your character class with the unicode property for letter \pL

/^\pL+( \pL+)*$/

See here on regular/expressions.info an overview of the unicode properties

in my test on writecodeonline.com this is working

$s = "Jānis Bērziņš";
preg_match("/^\\pL+( \\pL+)*$/", $s, $matches);

edited Feb 16 '12 at 14:47

answered Feb 16 '12 at 14:33

stema

Well, mentioned `Jānis Bērziņš` fails for that. – daGrevis Feb 16 '12 at 14:34
Please change your regex to `/^\pL+( \pL+)*$/uD` so it works as expected. – daGrevis Feb 16 '12 at 14:36
@daGrevism in my test its working as is without the `u` modifier, not sure whats causing this. – stema Feb 16 '12 at 14:45

2 Answers2