Question

For an internationalised project, I have to validate the global syntax for a name (first, last) with Python. But the lack of unicode classes support is really maling things harder.

Is there any regex / library to do that ?

Examples:

Björn, Anne-Charlotte, توماس, 毛, or מיק must be accepted.
-Björn, Anne–Charlotte, Tom_ or entries like that should be rejected.

Is there any simple way to do that ?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Python does support unicode in regular expressions if you specify the re.UNICODE flag. You can probably use something like this:

r'^[^\W_]+(-[^\W_]+)?$'

Test code:

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
import re

names = [
            u'Björn',
            u'Anne-Charlotte',
            u'توماس',
            u'毛',
            u'מיק',
            u'-Björn',
            u'Anne--Charlotte',
            u'Tom_',
        ]

for name in names:
    regex = re.compile(r'^[^\W_]+(-[^\W_]+)?$', re.U)
    print u'{0:20} {1}'.format(name, regex.match(name) is not None)

Result:

Björn                True
Anne-Charlotte       True
توماس                True
毛                    True
מיק                  True
-Björn               False
Anne--Charlotte      False
Tom_                 False

If you also want to disallow digits in names then change [^\W_] to [^\W\d_] in both places.