How to check letters from any language , spaces and some special characters? - php

Question

I have some data that some of the data contain non English letters , So I want to check letters from any language + spaces + some special characters.
The special characters are: ' () - &
I tried /^[\p{L} -()']+$/ but it's not working with something like Castaٌeda and word Castaٌeda
I want the first character to be any language letter , then a combination of all the allowed characters .
The string could be:
first-second
first second
first'second
first & second
first&second
first(second)
first (second)
first-second-third
first second third
first second third(fourth)
first-second-third(fourth)
..

Answer 1

I want the first character to be any language letter, then a combination of all the allowed characters.
You should re-arrange the current regex to require the first char to be a letter, and the character class to follow should be quantified with * (zero or more occurrences).
However, there are some things to note:
You may have hard spaces between the words, so it makes sense to replace the literal space with \s or \h (and use the u modifier in PHP to make them Unicode aware), or add the \x{00A0} pattern into the character class to match hard spaces
You need to escape a hyphen between single chars in the character class to make it match a literal hyphen, else, it creates a range of chars that the pattern can match
You should add any other allowed chars before the hyphen later, when you need to fine tune the pattern.
So, you may use
$pattern = "~^\p{L}[\p{L}\p{M}\h().'&-]*$~u";
See the regex demo.
Details
^ - start of string
\p{L} - any Unicode letter
[\p{L}\p{M}\h().'&-]* - zero or more
\p{L} - letters
\p{M} - diacritics
\h - horizontal whitespace
().'&- - these specific chars
$ - an end of string (better, add D modifier, or replace $ with \z to avoid matching before the last \n).
See the PHP demo:
$arr = ["first-second", "first second", "first'second", "first & second", "first&second", "first(second)", "first (second)", "first-second-third", "first second third", "first second third(fourth)", "first-second-third(fourth)", "word Castaٌeda", "Alfonso Lista (Potia)", "Bacolod-Kalawi (Bacolod-Grande)", "Balindong (Watu)", "President Manuel A. Roxas", "Enrique B. Magalona (Saravia)", "Bacolod-Kalawi (Bacolod-Grande)", "Datu Blah T. Sinsuat", "Don Victoriano Chiongbian (Don Mariano Marcos)", "Bulalacao (San Pedro)", "Hinoba-an (Asia)"];
$pattern = "~^\p{L}[\p{L}\p{M}\h().'&-]*$~u";
foreach ($arr as $s) {
echo $s;
if (preg_match($pattern, $s)) {
echo " => VALID\n";
} else {
echo " => INVALID\n";
}
}
Output:
first-second => VALID
first second => VALID
first'second => VALID
first & second => VALID
first&second => VALID
first(second) => VALID
first (second) => VALID
first-second-third => VALID
first second third => VALID
first second third(fourth) => VALID
first-second-third(fourth) => VALID
word Castaٌeda => VALID
Alfonso Lista (Potia) => VALID
Bacolod-Kalawi (Bacolod-Grande) => VALID
Balindong (Watu) => VALID
President Manuel A. Roxas => VALID
Enrique B. Magalona (Saravia) => VALID
Bacolod-Kalawi (Bacolod-Grande) => VALID
Datu Blah T. Sinsuat => VALID
Don Victoriano Chiongbian (Don Mariano Marcos) => VALID
Bulalacao (San Pedro) => VALID
Hinoba-an (Asia) => VALID