How to find if a string has all english or arabic letters

Question

I'm taking this question/answer further

but it's missing special characters check, can we do that?

My objective is to find out if the string has arabic characters but that might be difficult... (if not please advise).

Alternatively we can check if it has all english characters otherwise obviously it would be arabic since I've these two languages only...

You could try `mb_detect_encoding`: http://php.net/manual/en/function.mb-detect-encoding.php — dbrumann, Feb 22 '12 at 12:04
So you want to ensure that string only contains English or only Arabic characters, correct? — DavidW, Feb 22 '12 at 12:05
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2752691/how-to-detect-language-of-text ? — Svish, Feb 22 '12 at 12:08
By special characters, do you mean punctuations, symbols, etc? — Devendra D. Chavan, Feb 22 '12 at 12:08

score 10 · Answer 1 · answered Feb 19 '14 at 06:28

If it doesn't work, try the following:

$is_arabic = preg_match('/\p{Arabic}/u', $text);

The PHP preg functions, which are based on PCRE, support Unicode when the /u option is appended to the regular expression, as per http://www.regular-expressions.info/unicode.html.

score 5 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 22 '12 at 12:07

5

You can look for Arabic characters with regexp

$is_arabic = preg_match('/\p{Arabic}/', $text);

answered Feb 22 '12 at 12:07

gintas

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Feb 22 '12 at 12:09

1

According to regular-expressions.info, PCRE is optionally supporting Unicode scripts. So have a closer look here about scripts

\p{Arabic} is matching Arabic characters

answered Feb 22 '12 at 12:09

stema

3 Answers3