Using RegEx for validating First and Last names in Java

Question

I am trying to validate a String which contains the first & last name of a person. The acceptable formats of the names are as follows.

Bruce Schneier                  
Schneier, Bruce
Schneier, Bruce Wayne
O’Malley, John F.
John O’Malley-Smith
Cher

I came up with the following program that will validate the String variable. The validateName function should return true if the name format matches any of the mentioned formats able. Else it should return false.

import java.util.regex.*;

public class telephone {

    public static boolean validateName (String txt){
        String regx = "^[\\\\p{L} .'-]+$";
        Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile(regx, Pattern.CASE_INSENSITIVE);
        Matcher matcher = pattern.matcher(txt);
        return matcher.find();

    }

    public static void main(String args[]) {

        String name = "Ron O’’Henry";

        System.out.println(validateName(name));

    }
}

But for some reason, it is returning false for any value. What am I doing wrong here?

Answer 1

Use this:

^[\p{L}\s.’\-,]+$

Demo: https://regex101.com/r/dQ8fK8/1

Explanation:

1. The biggest problem you have is ' and ’ is different. You can only achieve that character by copy pasting from the text.
2. Use \- instead of - in [] since it will be mistaken as a range. For example: [a-z]
3. You can use \s instead of for matching any whitespaces.

Answer 2

You can do:

^[^\s]+,?(\s[^\s]+)*$