Question

I wrote a Regex to match first / last name for a registration form in my web site.
The requirements are:

• Up to 44 chars
• - or ' are acceptable
• One space is acceptable within the names
• Unicode is not required

Is there any way to make my expression shorter?

^[a-zA-Z]{2,12}['-]?[a-zA-Z]{1,10}\s?[a-zA-Z]{2,12}['-]?[a-zA-Z]{1,10}$

Is it too much restrictions for a name field?

Answer 1

First with your regex the response is up to 47 chars : 12+1+10+1+12+1+10.

I think the best way for you is to allow 44 chars from letters, coma, minus or white space.

You can force the first char to be a letter :

^[a-zA-Z][a-zA-Z\-'\s]{0,43}$