PHP regex for matching ALL special characters, included accented characters

Question

I am looking for a way to match all the possible special characters in a string. I have a list of cities in the world and many of the names of those cities contain special characters and accented characters. So I am looking for a regular expression that will return TRUE for any kind of special characters. All the ones I found only match some, but I need one for every possible special character out there, spaces at the begin of the string included. Is this possible?

This is the one I found, but does not match all the different and possible characters I may encounter in the name of a city:

preg_match('/[#$%^&*()+=\-\[\]\';,.\/{}|":<>?~\\\\]/', $string);

Define "special". What is "special" to you? Have you thought of doing it the other way around, defining a list of characters you deem "non-special" and checking if anything except those are in the string? — deceze
– deceze ♦, Commented Sep 17, 2013 at 13:25
its better to define what should not be matched, because there are many special characters plus accented — Jason OOO
– Jason OOO, Commented Sep 17, 2013 at 13:27

Community · Accepted Answer · 2023-11-17 20:08:53Z

1

You're going to need the UTF8 mode "#pattern#u": https://www.php.net/manual/en/reference.pcre.pattern.modifiers.php

Then you can use the Unicode escape sequences: https://www.php.net/manual/en/regexp.reference.unicode.php

So that preg_match("#\p{L}*#u", "København", $match) will match.

edited Nov 17, 2023 at 20:08

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answered Sep 17, 2013 at 13:37

seven77

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Toto · Accepted Answer · 2013-09-17 13:40:19Z

0

Use unicode properties:

\pL stands for any letter

To match a city names, i'd do (I suppose - and space are valid characters) :

preg_match('/\s*[\pL-\s]/u', $string);

answered Sep 17, 2013 at 13:40

Toto

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Jan. · Accepted Answer · 2013-09-17 13:41:14Z

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You can just reverse your pattern... to match everything what is not "a-Z09-_" you would use

preg_match('/[^-_a-z0-9.]/iu', $string);

The ^ in the character class reverses it.

answered Sep 17, 2013 at 13:41

Jan.

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Jan · Accepted Answer · 2017-03-27 21:39:09Z

I had the same problem where I wanted to split nameparts which also contained special characters:

For example if you want to split a bunch of names containing:

<lastname>,<forename(s)> <initial(s)> <suffix(es)>

fornames and suffix are separated with (white)space(s)
initials are separated with a . and with maximum of 6 initials

you could use

$nameparts=preg_split("/(\w*),((?:\w+[\s\-]*)*)((?:\w\.){1,6})(?:\s*)(.*)/u",$displayname,null,PREG_SPLIT_DELIM_CAPTURE);
//first and last part are always empty
array_splice($naamdelen, 5, 1);
array_splice($naamdelen, 0, 1);
print_r($nameparts);

Input:
Powers,Björn B.A. van der
Output:
Array ( [0] => Powers[1] => Björn [2] => B.A. [3] => van der)

Tip: the regular expression looks like from outer space but regex101.com to the rescue!

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