Unique regex for name validation - php

Question

I want to check is the name valid with regex PHP, but i need a unique regex that allows:
Letters (upper and lowercase)
Spaces (max 2)
But there can't be a space after space..
For example:
Name -> Dennis Unge Shishic (valid)
Name -> Denis(space)(space) (not valid)
Hope you guys understand me, thank you :)

Answer 1

First, it's worth mentioning that having such restrictive rules for the names of persons is a very bad idea. However, if you must, a simple character class like this will limit you to just uppercase and lowercase English letters:
[A-Za-z]
To match one or more, you need to add a + after it. So, this will match the first part of the name:
[A-Za-z]+
To capture a second name, you just need to do the same thing preceded by a space, so something like this will capture two names:
[A-Za-z]+ [A-Za-z]+
To make the second name optional, you need to surround it by parentheses and add a ? after it, like this:
[A-Za-z]+( [A-Za-z]+)?
And to add a third name, you just need to do it again:
[A-Za-z]+( [A-Za-z]+)? [A-Za-z]+
Or, you could specify that the latter names can repeat between 1 and 2 times, like this:
[A-Za-z]+( [A-Za-z]+){1,2}

Answer 2

To make the resulting code easy to understand and maintain, you could use two Regex. One checking (by requiring it to be true) that only the allowed characters are used ^[a-zA-Z ]+$ and then another one, checking (by requiring it to be false) that there are no two (or more) adjacent spaces ( ){2,}

Answer 3

Try following working code:
Change input to whatever you want to test and see correct validation result printed
<?php
$input_line = "Abhishek Gupta";
preg_match("/[a-zA-Z ]+/", $input_line, $nameMatch);
preg_match("/\s{2,}/", $input_line, $multiSpace);
var_dump($nameMatch);
var_dump($multiSpace);
if(count($nameMatch)>0){
if(count($multiSpace)>0){
echo "Invalid Name Multispace";
}
else{
echo "Valid Name";
}
}
else{
echo "Invalid Name";
}
?>

Answer 4

A regex for one to three words consisting of only Unicode letters in PHP looks like
/^\p{L}+(?:\h\p{L}+){1,2}\z/u
Description:
^ - string start
\p{L}+ - one or more Unicode letters
(?:\h\p{L}+){1,2} - one or two sequences of a horizontal whitespace followed with one or more Unicode letters
\z - end of string, even disallowing trailing newline that a dollar anchor allows.