First and surn name regex

Question

I wrote a Regex to match first / last name for a registration form in my web site. The requirements are:

• Up to 44 chars
• - or ' are acceptable
• One space is acceptable within the names
• Unicode is not required

Is there any way to make my expression shorter?

^[a-zA-Z]{2,12}['-]?[a-zA-Z]{1,10}\s?[a-zA-Z]{2,12}['-]?[a-zA-Z]{1,10}$

Is it too much restrictions for a name field?

Answer 1

First with your regex the response is up to 47 chars : 12+1+10+1+12+1+10.

I think the best way for you is to allow 44 chars from letters, coma, minus or white space.

You can force the first char to be a letter :

^[a-zA-Z][a-zA-Z\-'\s]{0,43}$

Answer 2

Here is what names your code might miss:

Jo Blow                  not passed
Hyoung Kyoung Wu         not passed
Mike O'Neal              not passed
d'Are to Beaware         not passed
O Henry Smith            not passed
Mathais d'Arras          not passed
Martin Luther King Jr    not passed
George De FunkMaster     not passed
Kurtis B-Ball Basketball not passed
Ahmad el Jeffe           not passed
An Ni                    not passed

You can try this one that can handle almost all names

^[^- '](?=(?![A-Z]?[A-Z]))(?=(?![a-z]+[A-Z]))(?=(?!.*[A-Z][A-Z]))(?=(?!.*[- '][- ']))[A-Za-z- ']{2,}$

Jo Blow                      passed
Hyoung Kyoung Wu             passed
Mike O'Neal                  passed
d'Are to Beaware             passed
O Henry Smith                passed
Mathais d'Arras              passed
Martin Luther King Jr        passed
George De FunkMaster         passed
Kurtis B-Ball Basketball     passed
Ahmad el Jeffe               passed
An Ni                        passed