I have a problem of a single input that has to have two names of a person input. Validating the name input to be of letters worked okay like it is shown here:
if(!preg_match("/^[a-zA-Z'-]+$/", $_POST['name'] )){
echo 'name must be letters';
}
That will only validate a single name eg: John. But what I need is to validate the that the string contains two words. Like James Doe
This is the form input:
<input autofocus id="aum" name="name" placeholder="John Doe" type="text" />
You can use the following regular expression:
^[a-zA-Z'-]+ [a-zA-Z'-]+$
Keep in mind, that you are disallowing every other character (e.g. foreign languages). Therefore it is better to use any possible word character. For PHP this would be \p{L}
^\p{L}+ \p{L}+$
You can also use multiple spaces (^\p{L}+ +\p{L}+$) or multiple spaces of any type of whitespace:
^\p{L}+\s+\p{L}+$
Here is a live example: https://regex101.com/r/aUkUKa/2
You can use the meta-character \s which match any whitespace character
/^[a-zA-Z]+\s[a-zA-Z]+$
^\w+\s\w+$
