Question

I’m looking for something will accept names, salutations, and numbers. Things like Mr., O’Henry, and Bobby-Lee should also be accepted. So besides a period, an apostrophe, a hyphen, letters, and numbers, nothing should work. Not even whitespace. Help is much appreciated!

Answer 1

Not even whitespace? I know people whose first name has two parts spelled with a space rather than a hyphen (English versions of Vietnamese and Chinese names).

http://regular-expressions.info/tutorial.html and
https://developer.mozilla.org/en/JavaScript/Guide/Regular_Expressions will tell you all you need to know to do something simple like this, but anyway:

var someString = "a string to test";

var namePattern = /[^A-Za-z\d.'-]/;

if (namePattern.test(someString)) {
   // contained invalid characters, do something
}

// Or you can say /[^A-Za-z\d.'-]/.test(someString) - no need to assign
// the regex to a variable if you're not using reusing it.

A regular expression with [^...] will match any character other than the ones following the ^. \d is for numeric digit.