Regex to reject non-english characters?

Question

Is there a simple regex that will catch all non-english characters? It would need to allow common punctation and symbols, but no special characters such as Russian, Japanese, etc.

Looking for something to work in PHP.

Answer 1

Since in your comment your referring to addresses, they might contain digits too. So:

preg_replace('/[^[:alpha:][:punct:][:digit:]]/u', utf8_encode($input), '');

Should replace your unwanted characters. The [:alpha:] class will only work, if your locale is set up correctly, though. If, for example, it's set to de_DE , not only "a" through "z" are regarded characters, but also "exotics" like "ä", "ö", "è", and the like.

Also, since you don't want "Russian, Japanese, etc.", note the u modifier. The input has to be UTF-8 encoded in order to not break it and give you wrong results.

Answer 2

这样的[^ A-Za-z0-9 \\，\\。\\-]吗？

Answer 3

这个问题似乎可以解决： PHP验证字符串字符为英国或美国键盘字符

Answer 4

use hex codes , eg this cleans out all non-ascii characters as well as line endings, and replaces them with spaces. space ( \\x20 ) is deliberately left out of the range so that consecutive runs of spaces and/or special chars are replaced with a single space.

$clean = trim(preg_replace('/[^\x21-\x7E]+/', ' ', $input));

Answer 5

if (strlen($str) == strlen(utf8_decode($str))) {

}