Regular expression for first and last name

Question

Don't forget about names like:

• Mathias d'Arras
• Martin Luther King, Jr.
• Hector Sausage-Hausen

This should do the trick for most things:

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

OR Support international names with super sweet unicode:

/^[a-zA-ZàáâäãåąčćęèéêëėįìíîïłńòóôöõøùúûüųūÿýżźñçčšžÀÁÂÄÃÅĄĆČĖĘÈÉÊËÌÍÎÏĮŁŃÒÓÔÖÕØÙÚÛÜŲŪŸÝŻŹÑßÇŒÆČŠŽ∂ð ,.'-]+$/u

You make false assumptions on the format of first and last name. It is probably better not to validate the name at all, apart from checking that it is empty.

After going through all of these answers I found a way to build a tiny regex that supports most languages and only allows for word characters. It even supports some special characters like hyphens, spaces and apostrophes. I've tested in python and it supports the characters below:

^[\w'\-,.][^0-9_!¡?÷?¿/\\+=@#$%ˆ&*(){}|~<>;:[\]]{2,}$

Characters supported:

abcdefghijklmnopqrstwxyz
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
áéíóúäëïöüÄ'
陳大文
łŁőŐűŰZàáâäãåąčćęèéêëėįìíîïłńòóôöõøùúûüųū
ÿýżźñçčšžÀÁÂÄÃÅĄĆČĖĘÈÉÊËÌÍÎÏĮŁ
ŃÒÓÔÖÕØÙÚÛÜŲŪŸÝŻŹÑßÇŒÆČŠŽ.-
ñÑâê都道府県Федерации
আবাসযোগ্য জমির걸쳐 있는

I have created a custom regex to deal with names:

I have tried these types of names and found working perfect

1. John Smith
   
2. John D'Largy
   
3. John Doe-Smith
   
4. John Doe Smith
   
5. Hector Sausage-Hausen
   
6. Mathias d'Arras
   
7. Martin Luther King
   
8. Ai Wong
   
9. Chao Chang
   
10. Alzbeta Bara
    

My RegEx looks like this:

^([a-zA-Z]{2,}\s[a-zA-Z]{1,}'?-?[a-zA-Z]{2,}\s?([a-zA-Z]{1,})?)

MVC4 Model:

[RegularExpression("^([a-zA-Z]{2,}\\s[a-zA-Z]{1,}'?-?[a-zA-Z]{2,}\\s?([a-zA-Z]{1,})?)", ErrorMessage = "Valid Charactors include (A-Z) (a-z) (' space -)") ]

Please note the double \\ for escape characters

For those of you that are new to RegEx I thought I'd include a explanation.

^               // start of line
[a-zA-Z]{2,}    // will except a name with at least two characters
\s              // will look for white space between name and surname
[a-zA-Z]{1,}    // needs at least 1 Character
\'?-?           // possibility of **'** or **-** for double barreled and hyphenated surnames
[a-zA-Z]{2,}    // will except a name with at least two characters
\s?             // possibility of another whitespace
([a-zA-Z]{1,})? // possibility of a second surname