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Asked: 2026-06-13T22:55:15+00:00

I have a regular expression that allows only specific characters from the name fields

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I have a regular expression that allows only specific characters from the name fields in an HTML form, namely letters, white space, single quotes, hyphens and periods. Here is the pattern:

return mb_ereg_match("^[\w\s'-\.]+$", $name);

Problem is this pattern, for some reason, returns true when there are literal asterisks in $name. This shouldn’t be possible unless I’m missing something. I’ve done multiple searches on literal asterisks and all I found was the "\*" pattern for intentionally matching them.

The same pattern in preg_match() also returns a match when passed a string like “*John”.

What the heck am I missing?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    You need a double-backslash in front of these codes. One to escape the backslash, one to escape the escape sequence.

    You also need to escape the -, otherwise it accepts all characters “between” ' and ..

    return mb_ereg_match("^[\\w\\s'\\-\\.]+$", $name);

    Have a look at a working case (using preg_match): http://ideone.com/E8afAM

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