CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javaregex
We are Borg
We are Borg

Reputation: 5311

Java, Regex : Adding umlaut and other german characters for first-name

I want to validate first-name sent by user with Regex. I found multiple expressions for first-name, but I also want to add german characters like äöüß and french ones à À è È é É ù Ù ì Ì ò Ò ñ Ñ to it. I tried regex evaluator suggested by SO here, but that didn't help. Wheneever I would make an extra square bracket, it would tell me Your regular expression does not match the subject string.. What am I doing wrong?

Current Regex pattern :

^([A-Z][a-z]*((\s)))+[A-Z][a-z][äöüß]*$

Thank you.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 11243

Answers (2)

Fallenhero
Fallenhero

Reputation: 1583

I agree with previous answer from Wiktor.

But to answer why your regex did not work:

You expected a capital letter followed by 0 or more letters and a space and then another word. And that other word is 1 cap. letter, 1 letter and then 0 or more Umlauts. I do not know any name that would fit. All those special characters should be in the same [] as the letters.

Also hyphenated names are not allowed.

So your regex could look more like this:

^([A-ZÜÄÖ][a-züäöß]*(\s|-))*[A-ZÜÄÖ][a-züäöß]*$

Upvotes: 3

Wiktor Stribiżew
Wiktor Stribiżew

Reputation: 626929

It is not a good idea to restrict people's names too much, I suggest a rather generic regex:

s.matches("(?U)[\\p{L}\\p{M}\\s'-]+")

This regex will match a string only consisting of 1 or more Unicode letters, diacritics, whitespaces, apostrophes or hyphens.

If you need more restrictive checks, like a whitespace may only appear inside the string and only if not consecutive, use grouping:

"(?U)[\\p{L}\\p{M}'-]+(?:\\s[\\p{L}\\p{M}'-]+)*"

Upvotes: 10

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