Question

I’ve read a great solution for unicode strings here, but I need to check entire string to be letters or spaces or dashes and I can’t think of any solution. The example is not working as I want.

name = u"Василий Соловьев-Седой"
r = re.compile(r'^([\s\-^\W\d_]+)$', re.U)
r.match(name) -> None

Answer 1

r = re.compile(r'^(?:[^\W\d_]|[\s-])+$', re.U)

[^\W\d_] matches any letter (by matching any alphanumeric character except for digits and underscore).

[\s-] of course matches whitespace and dashes.