Regular expression to match a name

Question

I am trying to write a regular expression in Javascript to match a name field, where the only allowed values are letters, apostrophes and hyphens. For example, the following names should be matched:

jhon's
avat-ar
Josh

Could someone please help me construct such a regex?

Answer 1

Yes.

^[a-zA-Z'-]+$

Here,

• ^ means start of the string, and $ means end of the string.
• […] is a character class which anything inside it will be matched.
• x+ means the pattern before it can be repeated once or more.

Inside the character class,

• az and AZ are the lower and upper case alphabets,
• ' is the apostrophe, and
• - is the hyphen. The hyphen must appear at the beginning or the end to avoid confusion with the range separator as in az .

Note that this class won't match international characters eg ä. You have to include them separately eg

^[-'a-zA-ZÀ-ÖØ-öø-ſ]+$

Answer 2

A compact version for the UTF-8 world that will match international letters and numbers.

/^[\p{L}\p{N}*-]+$/u

Explanation:

• [] => character class definition
• p{L} => matches any kind of letter character from any language
• p{N} => matches any kind of numeric character
• *- => matches asterisk and hyphen
• + => Quantifier — Matches between one to unlimited times (greedy)
• /u => Unicode modifier. Pattern strings are treated as UTF-16. Also causes escape sequences to match unicode characters.

Note, that if the hyphen is the last character in the class definition it does not need to be escaped . If the dash appears elsewhere in the class definition it needs to be escaped , as it will be seen as a range character rather then a hyphen.

Answer 3

更紧凑的版本是[\\w'-]+