Regular Expression - Only first character check non-letter characters

Question

I've started to study on javascript and regexp specially. I am trying to improve myself on generating regular expressions.

What I am trying to do is - I have a name field in my html file (its in a form ofc)

...
    <label for="txtName">Your Name*: </label>
    <input id="txtName" type="text" name="txtName" size="30" maxlength="40">
...

And in my js file I am trying to check name cannot start with any NON-letter character, only for the first character. And whole field cannoth contain any special character other than dash and space.

They cannot start with any non-letter character ;

/^[A-Z a-z][A-Z a-z 0-9]*$/

They cannot contain any symbol other than dash and space ;

/^*[[&-._].*]{1,}$/

When I am testing if it works, it doesn't work at all. In which part am I failing ?

Answer 1

Try /^[A-Za-z][A-Za-z0-9 -]*$/
When you include a space in the character listing ([]), it's going to be allowed in the string that's being searched.

^[A-Za-z] matches the first character and says that it must be a letter of some sort.
[A-Za-z0-9 -]*$ will match any remaining characters(if they exist) after the first character and make sure it's alpha numeric, or contains spaces or dashes.