Allow only some letters, ban special characters ($% etc.) except others (' -)
php, regex, unicode, utf-8
Solution
I can't reproduce the failure cases here (`Авпа Вапапва á-ź John` validates just fine), but you can simplify the regex a lot - you don't need that lookahead assertion:
preg_match('/^[a-zα-ωá-źа-яա-ֆა-ჰא-ת][a-zα-ωá-źа-яա-ֆა-ჰא-ת\' -]*$/i', $first_name)
As far as I can tell from the character ranges you've given, you don't need to exclude the digits because anything outside these character classes will already cause the regex to fail.
Another consideration: If your goal is to allow any letter from any language/script (plus some punctuation and space) you can (if you're using Unicode strings) further simplify this to:
preg_match('/^\pL[\pL\' -]*$/iu', $first_name)
But generally, I wouldn't try to validate a name by regular expressions (or any other means): Falsehoods programmers believe about names.
Problem
I need a Regex for PHP to do the following: I want to allow [a-zα-ωá-źа-яա-ֆა-ჰא-ת] and chinese, japanese (more utf-8) letters; I want to ban [^٩٨٧٦٥٤٣٢١٠۰۱۲۳۴۵۶۷۸۹] (arabic numbers); This is what i've done: ``` function isValidFirstName($first_name) { return preg_match("/^(?=[a-zα-ωá-źа-яա-ֆა-ჰא-ת]+([a-zα-ωá-źа-яա-ֆა-ჰא-ת' -]+)?\z)[a-zα-ωá-źа-яա-ֆა-ჰא-ת' -]+$/i", $first_name); } ``` It looks like it works, but if I type letters of more than 1 language, it doesn't validate. Examples: Авпа Вапапва á-ź John - doesn't validate. John Gger - validates, á-ź á-ź - validates. I would like to this all of these. Or if there's a way, to echo a message if user entered more lingual string.