Regexp for name string

Question

I'm trying to find a regexp that covers a lot of outcomes, the one I'm using now would be enough if it weren't for a lot of international names having special letters in them as well as hyphens.

The one I'm using now looks like this:

/^[A-Za-zåäöÅÄÖ\s\-\ ]*$/

It allows for hyphens and whitespace but it also allows them at the start or end of the string which I don't want to allow.

I need to modify this to allow:

Special letters such as éýÿüåäö etc. (preferrably by not having to write them all manually)

Capital letter at the start of each new word

Whitespace between words

- hyphens between words, but not before or after the full string

It should not allow numbers, which it doesn't already. Since I haven't worked a whole lot with regex construction I'm in the dark on how to achieve this, I've found a lot of solutions that covers one or the other scenario, but not all of the ones I need. I would appreciate the assistance. The regex should work for PHP validation.

EDIT:

$fname = 'Scrooge Mc-Duck'; //Only example string
$fname = trim($fname);

if (!preg_match('/^\p{Lu}\p{Ll}+([ -]+\p{Lu}\p{Ll}+)*$/', $fname)) {
    $fnameErr = 'Invalid first name'; 
}

This outputs the error when using @npinti's solution.

Answer 1

Assuming that your regular expression engine can expose character classes. You can use \p{L} to match any letter. So, to match a name, you could use ^\p{Lu}\p{Ll}+([ -]+\p{Lu}\p{Ll}+)*$.

This would allow you to match an upper case letter followed by one or more lower case letters. In turn, this can be followed by a combination of 0 or more white spaces and dashes and is then followed by an upper case letter and one ore more lower case letters. The ^ and $ at the beginning and end make sure that the regular expression matches the entire string.

A demo of the regex can be viewed here.