Question

I wish to create a validator for full names for one of my forms.

Unfortunately I am not sure the best way to go on about is, as it is not as trivial as:

if not char in string.letters + " .'":
    raise ValidationError("...")

Thought a regex would work, but \w, [:alpha:], [a-zA-Z] don’t really capture special characters.

Name examples:

• Tiësto

• Marie Josèphe

• Marie Françoise

• José de Ribas

---

Any ideas?

Holy… sounds like I opened a can of worms! Thanks for the great answers.

Answer 1

I personally wouldn’t bother about validating names, I guess there are so many possiblities it is very hard to maintain. If you could come up with a regular expression, I think it would be so generic it wouldn’t be effective. The only thing I can think of as valuable is excluding things like @ # $ % ^.

Just make sure you are escaping characters, if someone’s name is Fooalert(‘lala’), that’s fine, but make sure it’s not parsed.