Question

Tried looking around for a regex pattern for a full name and just can’t seem to find one.

Ideally would match like

Tom Franklin
tom Franklin
tom franklin
tom franklin-jones

i.e. allow 1 space in the middle and some basic hyphens etc but thats all. Does any one know how to do this ?

Edit: Including

René Hadron van der Ööps

Answer 1

You can use /([\p{L}'-]+) ([\p{L}'-]+)/ to catch all possible letter. Or /([a-z'-]+) ([a-z'-]+)/i to catch only ascii letters.

The group ([\p{L}'-]+) means [\p{L}'-] repeated at least one time. And \p{L} means any unicode letter. The - at the end means that “-” is allowed in names.

Note :
When you capture characters with [] the hyphen must be either at the start of your characters set or at the end.

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Edit :

Mr. O’Brien is happy now.

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Resources :

• regular-expressions.info – unicode
• regular-expressions.info – character sets