PHP letters and spaces only validation

Question

I'm validating my contact form using PHP and I've used the following code:

if (ctype_alpha($name) === false) {
            $errors[] = 'Name must only contain letters!';
}

This code is works fine, but it over validates and doesn't allow spaces. I've tried ctype_alpha_s and that comes up with a fatal error.

Any help would be greatly appreciated

Answer 1

One for the UTF-8 world that will match spaces and letters from any language.

if (!preg_match('/^[\p{L} ]+$/u', $name)){
  $errors[] = 'Name must contain letters and spaces only!';
}

Explanation:

• [] => character class definition
• p{L} => matches any kind of letter character from any language
• Space after the p{L} => matches spaces
• + => Quantifier — matches between one to unlimited times (greedy)
• /u => Unicode modifier. Pattern strings are treated as UTF-16. Also causes escape sequences to match unicode characters

This will also match names like Björk Guðmundsdóttir as noted in a comment by Anthony Hatzopoulos above.

Answer 2

Regex is overkill and will perform worse for such a simple task, consider using native string functions:

if (ctype_alpha(str_replace(' ', '', $name)) === false) {
  $errors[] = 'Name must contain letters and spaces only';
}

This will strip spaces prior to running the alpha check. If tabs and new lines are an issue you could consider using this instead:

str_replace(array("\n", "\t", ' '), '', $name);

Answer 3

ctype_alpha only checks for the letters [A-Za-z]

If you want to use it for your purpose, first u will have to remove the spaces from your string and then apply ctype_alpha.

But I would go for preg_match to check for validation. You can do something like this.

if ( !preg_match ("/^[a-zA-Z\s]+$/",$name)) {
   $errors[] = "Name must only contain letters!";
} 

Answer 4

if (ctype_alpha(str_replace(' ', '', $name)) === false)  {
  $errors[] = 'Name must contain letters and spaces only';
}