On Jul 23, Stephanie Stiavetti said:
>I need to make sure that a field contains ONLY letters... and this is the
>regular expression I'm using:
>
>$name=~/^[a-zA-Z]+/
That doesn't check to make sure the string ONLY has those. It checks to
see whether it STARTS with them.
>what am I doing wrong? also, will said regular expression accept foreign
>characters as letters, like an umlaut? (ö)
In order to allow locale-specific characters, you must the \w char. class
abbreviation:
if ($name =~ /^\w+$/) {
# valid
}
However, that includes 0-9 and _ as well. To exclude those requires a bit
of shenanigans:
if ($name =~ /^[^\W0-9_]+$/) {
# valid
}
Hopefully, in Perl 5.8 or Perl 6, there will be a much simpler character
class subtraction syntax:
if ($name =~ /^[\w&&[^0-9_]]+$/) {
# valid
}
which reads "\w AND NOT 0-9_".
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