regular expression for French characters

user_233490 0
Viewed 41831

I need a function or a regular expression to validate strings which contain alpha characters (including French ones), minus sign (-), dot (.) and space (excluding everything else)

Thanks

php regex
9 Answers
/^[a-zàâçéèêëîïôûùüÿñæœ .-]*$/i

Use of /i for case-insensitivity to make things simpler. If you don't want to allow empty strings, change * to +.

user_1488700

Try:

/^[\p{L}-. ]*$/u

This says:

^         Start of the string
[ ... ]*  Zero or more of the following:
  \p{L}     Unicode letter characters
  -         dashes
  .         periods
            spaces
$         End of the string
/u        Enable Unicode mode in PHP
user_751700

The character class I've been using is the following:

[\wÀ-Üà-øoù-ÿŒœ]. This covers a slightly larger character set than only French, but excludes a large portion of Eastern European and Scandinavian diacriticals and letters that are not relevant to French. I find this a decent compromise between brevity and exclusivity.

To match/validate complete sentences, I use this expression: [\w\s.,!?:;&#%’'"()«»À-Üà-øoù-ÿŒœ], which includes punctuation and French style quotation marks.

user_4673860

Simply use the following code :

     /[\u00C0-\u017F]/
user_123157420

All French and Spanish accents /^[a-zA-ZàâäæáãåāèéêëęėēîïīįíìôōøõóòöœùûüūúÿçćčńñÀÂÄÆÁÃÅĀÈÉÊËĘĖĒÎÏĪĮÍÌÔŌØÕÓÒÖŒÙÛÜŪÚŸÇĆČŃÑ .-]*$/

user_189524690

This might suit:

/^[ a-zA-Z\xBF-\xFF\.-]+$/

It lets a few extra chars in, like ÷, but it handles quite a few of the accented characters.

nickf_90210

/[A-Za-z-\.\s]/u should work.. /u switch is for UTF-8 encoding

user_1911490
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