Regex to match only letters

Question

How can I write a regex that matches only letters?

Answer 1

You would use

/[a-z]/gi

[]--checks for any characters between given inputs

a-z---covers the entire alphabet

g-----globally throughout the whole string

i-----getting upper and lowercase

Answer 2

Lately I have used this pattern in my forms to check names of people, containing letters, blanks and special characters like accent marks.

pattern="[A-zÀ-ú\s]+"

Answer 3

So, I've been reading a lot of the answers, and most of them don't take exceptions into account, like letters with accents or diaeresis (á, à, ä, etc.).

I made a function in typescript that should be pretty much extrapolable to any language that can use RegExp. This is my personal implementation for my use case in typescript. What I basically did is add ranges of letters with each kind of symbol that I wanted to add. I also converted the char to upper case before applying the RegExp, which saves me some work.

function isLetter(char: string): boolean {
  return char.toUpperCase().match('[A-ZÀ-ÚÄ-Ü\s]+') !== null;
}

If you want to add another range of letters with another kind of accent, just add it to the regex. Same goes for special symbols.

I implemented this function with TDD and I can confirm this works with, at least, the following cases:

    character | isLetter
    ${'A'}    | ${true}
    ${'e'}    | ${true}
    ${'Á'}    | ${true}
    ${'ü'}    | ${true}
    ${'ù'}    | ${true}
    ${'û'}    | ${true}
    ${'('}    | ${false}
    ${'^'}    | ${false}
    ${"'"}    | ${false}
    ${'`'}    | ${false}

Answer 4

\p{L} matches anything that is a Unicode letter if you're interested in alphabets beyond the Latin one

Answer 5

Use character groups

\D

Matches any character except digits 0-9

^\D+$

See example here

Answer 6

The closest option available is

[\u\l]+

which matches a sequence of uppercase and lowercase letters. However, it is not supported by all editors/languages, so it is probably safer to use

[a-zA-Z]+

as other users suggest