Question

I need a regular expression to check that every word of some input begins with the same letter (and also allows certain punctuation).

Currently I have the following:

^(((\b[aA])\w*([\s\.\-\!\?\"\':,])*)+)|(((\b[bB])\w*([\s\.\-\!\?\"\':,])*)+)$

Going from [aA] all the way up to [zZ]

Obviously this isn’t the nicest way to go about it.
Does anyone have a smart regular expression?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Use backreferences with case-insensitive matching.

^\s*([a-z])[a-z]*(?:\s+\1[a-z]*)*\s*$