I have an issue using preg_match with php.
I want my users to fill the Name field with only valid characters. Ex: no numbers or special chars.
My site will eventually be bilingual but most of my visitors are french Canadians
I prefer utf-8 for my encoding. So at the top of my document i have this tag :
<meta charset="utf-8" />
I need to accept accented characters in my form and i have tryed this :
(preg_match('/^p{L}+$/ui',$string))
But i cant get accent to be accepted this way.
Here is an example of what a name could contain as characters
jean-françois d’abiguäel
That’s pretty much as bad as it could get
Everyone seems to get (preg_match('/^p{L}+$/ui',$string)) working, but me.
I would need something like this :
/^p{L}(p{L}+[- ']?)*p{L}$/ui
But i need to get it working.
My servers are IIS (godaddy) PHP Version is 5.4 default timezone is set to America/Montreal
Thank you!
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Answer
This pattern should work:
/^pL+(?>[- ']pL+)*$/u
But feel free to adapt it for more exotic names (For example names with a trailing quote or an apostrophe).