Javascript regex for validating name without accented characters

Question

I'm using a simple Javascript regular expression to validate people's names. However, I do not want to allow a user to enter accented characters like ã, ä, õ, ö, etc. I am aware that these can actually be valid characters in a name, but for my exercise, I need to be able to filter them out.

My current regex:

^[a-zA-Z]+('|-|.|)[a-zA-Z\s]+$

This matches accented characters as well. How do I modify this regex so that it doesn't match names with accents (or any Unicode character, for that matter)?

falsetru · Accepted Answer · 2013-08-08 09:07:00Z

2

Remove ., because . match any character. That could cause matching accented character.

^[a-zA-Z]+('|-)[a-zA-Z\s]+$

or escape . if you mean literal dot.

^[a-zA-Z]+('|-|\.)[a-zA-Z\s]+$

answered Aug 8, 2013 at 9:07

falsetru

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2 Comments

mart1n Over a year ago

You should also remove that last pipe character because it creates an empty (though harmless) character match between | and ).

falsetru Over a year ago

@mart1n, I removed that. Thank you.

georg · Accepted Answer · 2013-08-08 09:17:40Z

1

To match a single character it's better to use a class [...], not a group with alternatives (...|...):

^[a-zA-Z]+['.-][a-zA-Z\s]+$

Note that this is not 100% accurate, since it validates things like foo.bar etc.

answered Aug 8, 2013 at 9:17

georg

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