Correction of the regex
Your repeat condition should include the ".*". I did not check if your regex is correct for what you want to achieve, but this correction works for the following strings:
$testStrings=["aaa123","a1b2c3","a1b23d"];
foreach($testStrings as $s)
var_dump(preg_match('/^(?![_\-\s0-9])(?!.*?[_\-\s]$)(?=.*[a-zA-Z]){3,}[_\-\sa-zA-Z0-9]+$/', $s));
Other implementations
As the language seems to be JavaScript, here is an optimised implementation for what you want to achieve:
"a24be4Z".match(/[a-zA-Z]/g).length>=3
We get the list of all matches and check if there are at least 3.
That is not the "fastest" way as the result needs to be created.
)
/(?:.*?[a-zA-Z]){3}/.test("a24be4Z")
is faster. ".*?" avoids that the "test" method matches all characters up to the end of the string before testing other combinations.
As expected, the first suggestion (counting the number of matches) is the slowest.
Check https://jsperf.com/check-if-there-are-3-ascii-characters .