CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpregexpreg-match
Altimus Prime
Altimus Prime

Reputation: 2327

Form validation of a name php including apostrophe, space, hyphen and period

I'm having a hard time putting the correct expression together, so that it rejects everything except letters, periods, apostrophes, spaces and hyphens.

So far this works for everything except the apostrophe, which I've tried to escape with both single and double "\" to no avail.

  if(!preg_match("/^[a-zA-Z'. -]+$/",$_POST['name']))
  {
      $error_name="The name you entered is invalid.";
  }
 //obrien - pass
 //o'brien - fail
 //Dr. OBrien - pass
 //Dr. O'Brien - fail

This works perfectly except that no apostrophe clears it.

Upvotes: 3

Views: 4714

Answers (3)

Gozie
Gozie

Reputation: 31

Here's an amazing one I was able to come up with, I think it should be able to work with most names that have both hypens, apostrophes, spaces and so on.

    if(!preg_match('/^([a-zA-Z]+[\'-]?[a-zA-Z]+[ ]?)+$/', $string))

Upvotes: 3

Altimus Prime
Altimus Prime

Reputation: 2327

The problem ended up being that in the php.ini that I can't access on my godaddy account, addslashes must be enabled. The following made it work. Thank you to Sergey for leading me to think about what the server might be doing to the posted data.

if(!preg_match("/^[a-zA-Z'. -]+$/", stripslashes($_POST['name']))
{
whatever error message
}

Upvotes: 3

Ronin
Ronin

Reputation: 1693

I think it happens because you are trying to check url-encoded string. Replace $_POST['name'] with urldecode($_POST['name']). The apostrophe at this stage looks like %27, so O'Brien in $_POST['name'] is O%27Brien and it will not pass your regular expression.

Edit: Also, maybe it is another type of apostrophe you have entered in the form: ’.

As a result:

if(!preg_match("/^[a-zA-Z’'. -]+$/",urldecode($_POST['name'])) {
    $error_name="The name you entered is invalid.";
}

Upvotes: 2

Related Questions