Java Regex to Validate Full Name allow only Spaces and Letters

Question

I want regex to validate for only letters and spaces. Basically this is to validate full name. Ex: Mr Steve Collins or Steve Collins I tried this regex.

Answer 1

You could even try this expression ^[a-zA-Z\\s]*$ for checking a string with only letters and spaces (nothing else).

For me it worked. Hope it works for you as well.

Or go through this piece of code once:

    CharSequence inputStr = expression;
    Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile(new String ("^[a-zA-Z\\s]*$"));
    Matcher matcher = pattern.matcher(inputStr);
    if(matcher.matches())
    {
         //if pattern matches
    }
    else
    {
         //if pattern does not matches
    }

Answer 2

What about:

• Peter Müller
• François Hollande
• Patrick O'Brian
• Silvana Koch-Mehrin

Validating names is a difficult issue, because valid names are not only consisting of the letters A-Z.

At least you should use the Unicode property for letters and add more special characters. A first approach could be e.g.:

String regx = "^[\\p{L} .'-]+$";

\\p{L} is a Unicode Character Property that matches any kind of letter from any language