How do I match accented characters with PHP preg?

Question

I’d like to give my users the option to not only fill in letters and numbers, but also “special” letters like the “á”, “é”, etc. However, I do not want them to be able to use symbols like “!”, “@”, "%”, etc.

Is there a way to write a regex to accomplish this? (Preferably without specifying each special letter.)

Now I have:

$reg = '/^[\w\-]*$/';

Gumbo · Accepted Answer · 2010-01-25 16:43:19Z

42

You could use Unicode character properties to describe the characters:

/^[\p{L}-]*$/u

\p{L} describes the class of Unicode letter characters.

answered Jan 25, 2010 at 16:43

Gumbo

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bcag2 Over a year ago

don't forget to add modifier u at the end : /u to select UTF-8 mode … php.net/manual/fr/regexp.reference.unicode.php#118693

Matteo Riva · Accepted Answer · 2010-01-25 16:42:01Z

5

What characters are considered "word-characters" depends on the locale. You should set a locale which has those characters in its natural alphabet, and use the /u modifier for the regexp, like this:

$str = 'perché';
setlocale(LC_ALL, 'it_IT@euro');
echo preg_match('#^\w+$#u', $str);

answered Jan 25, 2010 at 16:42

Matteo Riva

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Maurice Over a year ago

doesn't seem to work either. But Gumbo's solution worked. Thanks for the reply

Manuel · Accepted Answer · 2010-01-25 16:42:46Z

4

you can try with this regex:

$reg = '~[^\\pL\d]+~u';

which catch also accented characters

answered Jan 25, 2010 at 16:42

Manuel

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Maurice Over a year ago

doesn't seem to work on my server. But Gumbo's answer worked. Thanks for the reply

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