`preg_match` the Whole String in PHP

Question

This thing really confuses me, pardon my ignorance.

I have a var $name in here that I want to be free from number, I don\'t want any digit to be included in

Answer 1

#3 matches because you have both letters and numbers. Your regex in English basically says

it matches if there is a non-digit character

If you want to match only non-digit characters, you have to have the regex match against the entire string and allow for an arbitrary number of characters:

^[^\d]+$