PHP letters and spaces only validation

Question

I'm validating my contact form using PHP and I've used the following code:

if (ctype_alpha($name) === false) {
            $errors[] = 'Name must only contain letters!';
}

This code is works fine, but it over validates and doesn't allow spaces. I've tried ctype_alpha_s and that comes up with a fatal error.

Any help would be greatly appreciated

What about hyphens and single quotes/backticks. Those are valid characters in names as well. — Eric
– Eric, Commented Mar 11, 2013 at 18:56
and what about John O'Reily or Björk Guðmundsdóttir or A'ishah-Yunus — Anthony Hatzopoulos
– Anthony Hatzopoulos, Commented Mar 11, 2013 at 19:18

Martin · Accepted Answer · 2013-03-11 19:08:27Z

33

Regex is overkill and will perform worse for such a simple task, consider using native string functions:

if (ctype_alpha(str_replace(' ', '', $name)) === false) {
  $errors[] = 'Name must contain letters and spaces only';
}

This will strip spaces prior to running the alpha check. If tabs and new lines are an issue you could consider using this instead:

str_replace(array("\n", "\t", ' '), '', $name);

edited Mar 11, 2013 at 19:08

answered Mar 11, 2013 at 18:54

Martin

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Comments

V_K · Accepted Answer · 2013-03-11 19:00:49Z

12

ctype_alpha only checks for the letters [A-Za-z]

If you want to use it for your purpose, first u will have to remove the spaces from your string and then apply ctype_alpha.

But I would go for preg_match to check for validation. You can do something like this.

if ( !preg_match ("/^[a-zA-Z\s]+$/",$name)) {
   $errors[] = "Name must only contain letters!";
}

answered Mar 11, 2013 at 19:00

V_K

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Comments

Epiphany · Accepted Answer · 2017-09-26 04:05:38Z

6

One for the UTF-8 world that will match spaces and letters from any language.

if (!preg_match('/^[\p{L} ]+$/u', $name)){
  $errors[] = 'Name must contain letters and spaces only!';
}

Explanation:

[] => character class definition
p{L} => matches any kind of letter character from any language
Space after the p{L} => matches spaces
+ => Quantifier — matches between one to unlimited times (greedy)
/u => Unicode modifier. Pattern strings are treated as UTF-16. Also causes escape sequences to match unicode characters

This will also match names like Björk Guðmundsdóttir as noted in a comment by Anthony Hatzopoulos above.

edited Sep 26, 2017 at 4:05

answered Sep 26, 2017 at 0:28

Epiphany

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Comments

Jonas Czech · Accepted Answer · 2016-06-06 12:35:30Z

1

if (ctype_alpha(str_replace(' ', '', $name)) === false)  {
  $errors[] = 'Name must contain letters and spaces only';
}

edited Jun 6, 2016 at 12:35

Jonas Czech

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answered Jun 6, 2016 at 10:56

Jinia

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1 Comment

Jonas Czech Over a year ago

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