Question

In a given string, I’m trying to verify that there are at least two words, where a word is defined as any non-numeric characters so for example

// Should pass
Phil D'Sousa
Billy - the - Kid

// Should Fail
Joe
454545 354434

I thought this should work:

(\b\D*?\b){2,}

But it does not.

Answer 1

You can globally search for a “word” and check the length of the .match() if a match is found:.

If two or more words are found, you’re good:

var matches = string.match(/\b[^\d\s]+\b/g);
if ( matches && matches.length >= 2 ) 
    { /* Two or more words ... */ }; 

You can define a word as \b[^d\s]+\b, which is a word boundary \b, one or more non digits and non whitespaces [^d\s]+, and another word boundary \b. You have to make sure to use the global option g for the regex to find all the possible matches.

You can tweak the definition of a word in your regex. The trick is to make use of the length property of the .match(), but you should not check this property if there are no matches, since it’ll break the script, so you must do if (matches && matches.length ...).

Additionally it’s quite simple to modify the above code for X words where X is either a number or a variable.

jsFiddle example with your 4 examples