Question

I would like to use PHP’s preg_match_all to capture substrings which comprise:

• A-Z, a-z, all accented chars;
• space;
• hyphen.

It must not capture strings with anything else in them, including numeric chars.

This example is close but also catches strings containing numeric chars:

preg_match_all("/([\w -]+)/u", $abigstring, $matches);

Answer 1

That’s a job for Unicode properties:

preg_match_all("/([\p{L} -]+)/u", $abigstring, $matches);

\p{L} matches any character with the Unicode property “Letter”.