Regular Expression for all letters in all alphabets with spaces exept anything else

Question

I'm trying to make a name field filter with jQuery and I tried so many regular expressions and no of them work fully.

All I need is to make the name field as the name field - nothing else, e.g. Adam Jeremy Smith for example. So there would be no possibility to type $ or / or _ or ~ or 0-9 or anything else? How to do this?

I thought it should be:

/[^\\p{L}]+([^0-9])+$/

Yeah it works only if you type e.g. 'Adam Je4' but if you continue and write 'Adam Je4remy' it doesn't work and validates it incorrectly?

How to achieve it?

Don't forget to allow apostrophes at least. There are a lot of O'Briens around. — Blorgbeard, Jul 17 '12 at 22:23
possible duplicate of [Regular expression for validating names and surnames?](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/888838/regular-expression-for-validating-names-and-surnames) — Blorgbeard, Jul 17 '12 at 22:25

score 4 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:30

If you define name as something that consists of 1 or more words, separated by spaces, where each word consists of one or more letters, and starts with uppercase, it's written something like...

/^[A-Z][a-z]+(\s+[A-Z][a-z]+)*$/

But it's actually much more complicated, see - and it's not only about letters (\p{L} in your example; btw, property unicode classes are not supported by JS, you have to use plugins (like this one, for example) to implement such functionality).

For example, will you allow apostrophes in your names? If so, how can they be used (probably no name has two apostrophes close, like this - I''van Ivanov? What about hyphens? What about different capitalization rules: will you consider brian d foy a true name, for example? And so on...

The point is you have to balance what you actually expect to see with the complexity of your regex.

Sounds great! I didn't know that js doesn't support unicode classes! I'll take a look at the plugin! Thank you for you reply! — Ilia Ross, Jul 18 '12 at 08:01

QuantumBadger · Answer 2 · 2012-07-17T22:37:25.773

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Strictly limiting the format of names like that is bad practice, because it fails to take into account all sorts of cases - people with apostrophes and dashes in their names, people from European/Asian countries who use additional characters, and so on.

See this article for more info: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/

edited Jul 17 '12 at 22:37

answered Jul 17 '12 at 22:30

QuantumBadger

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`[^0-9]` means everything *except* `0-9`. But +1 for linking to that article. – Blorgbeard Jul 17 '12 at 22:34

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Jul 17 '12 at 22:26

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The answer is: /^[A-z\s]+$/

answered Jul 17 '12 at 22:26

hsanders

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Unfortunately it will not work with Unicode characters such as Russian or Japanese! I ended up using PHP for that purposes! – Ilia Ross Jul 21 '12 at 09:43

Regular Expression for all letters in all alphabets with spaces exept anything else

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