Re: Wanted: Good Name Filtering regex

[Tom Allison]

Chuck Tomasi wrote:

System Specs
============
Perl 5.6.1 (dev) 5.8.0 (prod)
Mac OS X 10.2.2 (dev) NetBSD 1.5.2 (prod)
MySQL 3.23.52

I'm writing a web form to accept user applications.  Like most programs,
I'd like to keep the garbage characters out to limit hacking attempts.
I want to verify the firstname and last name fall within some guidelines.
I realize there is a wealth of exceptions, but this program is designed to
be used largely by my family.  That isn't to say that others on the net
will try and hack it.  I was wondering if anyone could help me come up
with a good regular expression to allow only letters, spaces, and
apostrophes (e.g. O'Donnell, Van Linden would be valid).  I'm not quite
clear on how to do exceptions.

Ex: if ($st contains anything other than [a-zA-Z\s\']) {
	&Error("Stick with letters, spaces, and apostrophes please.");
	return 0;
   }

Thanks.

Why not go with /[\w ]+/
\s contains more than just a ' ' and I don't know if an apostrophe in a name is really valid or not.
Rather, I think the earlier suggestion of /[\w ]{,20}/ might be better so you can limit the string length to only the first 20 characters.
Similarly, I would limit the html input box to only 20 characters for simplicity.

--
The older I grow, the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age
brings wisdom.
-- H.L. Mencken


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