CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpregex
Montoolivo
Montoolivo

Reputation: 147

How to check if a string contains only letters in PHP?

I want to write a PHP code which checks whether a variable contains only letters NOT characters not numbers, I have typed this but it's not working:

$myVar = "Var#iable5";

ereg(^[a-zA-Z] , $myVar)

Upvotes: 1

Views: 22185

Answers (3)

hlscalon
hlscalon

Reputation: 7552

PHP has a built in function to do that: ctype_alpha

$myVar = "Var#iable5"; 
var_dump (ctype_alpha($myVar)); // false

From the docs:

Checks if all of the characters in the provided string, text, are alphabetic. In the standard C locale letters are just [A-Za-z] and ctype_alpha() is equivalent to (ctype_upper($text) || ctype_lower($text)) if $text is just a single character, but other languages have letters that are considered neither upper nor lower case.

Upvotes: 1

AbraCadaver
AbraCadaver

Reputation: 78994

No need for regex:

$result = ctype_alpha($myVar);

Upvotes: 14

Marc B
Marc B

Reputation: 360592

Start by not using ereg(). That's been deprecrated for literally years, and WILL be removed from PHP at some point. Plus, your pattern is incorrect. ^ as you're using it is a pattern anchor, signifying "start of line".

You want:

preg_match('/[^a-zA-Z]/', $myVar)

instead. As the first char inside a [] group, ^ means "Not", so "NOT a-zA-Z", not "[a-zA-Z] at start of line" as you were trying.

Upvotes: 1

Related Questions