Regular expression for first and last name

Question

For website validation purposes, I need first name and last name validation.

For the first name, it should only contain letters, can be several words with spaces, an

Answer 1

As maček said:

Don't forget about names like:

Mathias d'Arras

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Hector Sausage-Hausen

and to remove cases like:

..Mathias

Martin king, Jr.-

This will cover more cases:

^([a-z]+[,.]?[ ]?|[a-z]+['-]?)+$

Answer 2

The following expression will work on any language supported by UTF-16 and will ensure that there's a minimum of two components to the name (i.e. first + last), but will also allow any number of middle names.

/^(\S+ )+\S+$/u

At the time of this writing it seems none of the other answers meet all of that criteria. Even ^\p{L}{2,}$, which is the closest, falls short because it will also match "invisible" characters, such as U+FEFF (Zero Width No-Break Space).

Answer 3

This seems to do the job for me:

[\S]{2,} [\S]{2,}( [\S]{2,})*

Answer 4

Fullname with only one whitespace:

^[a-zA-Z'\-\pL]+(?:(?! {2})[a-zA-Z'\-\pL ])*[a-zA-Z'\-\pL]+$

Answer 5

If you want the whole first name to be between 3 and 30 characters with no restrictions on individual words, try this :

[a-zA-Z ]{3,30}

Beware that it excludes all foreign letters as é,è,à,ï.

If you want the limit of 3 to 30 characters to apply to each individual word, Jens regexp will do the job.

Answer 6

There is one issue with the top voted answer here which recommends this regex:

/^[a-z ,.'-]+$/i

It takes spaces only as a valid name!

The best solution in my opinion is to add a negative look forward to the beginning:

^(?!\s)([a-z ,.'-]+)$/i