Question

I’m looking for a regexp to see if a string contains any special characters, numbers or anything else but letters.

For example I have a string "This is a 5 string #". Now I would need a regexp to see if this string contains any special characters like # or numbers like 5.

I’m not familiar with using regexp approaches.

Answer 1

you can use .test() method

if ("This is a 5 string #".test(/[^a-z]/i)) { ... }

this will find if some symbols different from a-z and A-Z are inside the string. Note also that this regexp won’t accept accented letters. in that case you will need a more refined regexp like

/[^a-zA-Z\u00C0-\u00D6\u00D8-\u00F6\u00F8-\u02FF]/

see a unicode table to choose what symbols are acceptable in your string

http://unicode.org/charts/