Question

I am trying to write a regular expression in Javascript to match a name field, where the only allowed values are letters, apostrophes and hyphens. For example, the following names should be matched:

jhon's
avat-ar
Josh

Could someone please help me construct such a regex?

Answer 1

Yes.

^[a-zA-Z'-]+$

Here,

• ^ means start of the string, and $ means end of the string.
• […] is a character class which anything inside it will be matched.
• x+ means the pattern before it can be repeated once or more.

Inside the character class,

• a-z and A-Z are the lower and upper case alphabets,
• ' is the apostrophe, and
• - is the hyphen. The hyphen must appear at the beginning or the end to avoid confusion with the range separator as in a-z.

Note that this class won’t match international characters e.g. ä. You have to include them separately e.g.

^[-'a-zA-ZÀ-ÖØ-öø-ſ]+$