Regex to match only letters

Question

How can I write a regex that matches only letters?

Answer 1

/[a-zA-Z]+/

Super simple example. Regular expressions are extremely easy to find online.

http://www.regular-expressions.info/reference.html

Answer 2

If you mean any letters in any character encoding, then a good approach might be to delete non-letters like spaces \s, digits \d, and other special characters like:

[!@#\$%\^&\*\(\)\[\]:;'",\. ...more special chars... ]

Or use negation of above negation to directly describe any letters:

\S \D and [^  ..special chars..]

Pros:

• Works with all regex flavors.
• Easy to write, sometimes save lots of time.

Cons:

• Long, sometimes not perfect, but character encoding can be broken as well.

Answer 3

/^[A-z]+$/.test('asd')
// true

/^[A-z]+$/.test('asd0')
// false

/^[A-z]+$/.test('0asd')
// false

Answer 4

pattern = /[a-zA-Z]/

puts "[a-zA-Z]: #{pattern.match("mine blossom")}" OK

puts "[a-zA-Z]: #{pattern.match("456")}"

puts "[a-zA-Z]: #{pattern.match("")}"

puts "[a-zA-Z]: #{pattern.match("#$%^&*")}"

puts "[a-zA-Z]: #{pattern.match("#$%^&*A")}" OK

Answer 5

Depending on your meaning of "character":

[A-Za-z] - all letters (uppercase and lowercase)

[^0-9] - all non-digit characters

Answer 6

JavaScript

If you want to return matched letters:

('Example 123').match(/[A-Z]/gi) // Result: ["E", "x", "a", "m", "p", "l", "e"]

If you want to replace matched letters with stars ('*') for example:

('Example 123').replace(/[A-Z]/gi, '*') //Result: "****** 123"*