Regular Expression to match only letters

Question

I need write a regular expression for RegularExpressionValidator ASP.NET Web Controls.

The regular expression should ALLOW all alphabetic characters but not numbers or special characters (example: |!"£$%&/().

Any idea how to do it?

Answer 1

^[A-Za-z]+$

validates a string of length 1 or greater, consisting only of ASCII letters.

^[^\W\d_]+$

does the same for international letters, too.

Explanation:

[^   # match any character that is NOT a
\W   # non-alphanumeric character (letters, digits, underscore)
\d   # digit
_    # or underscore
]    # end of character class

Effectively, you get \w minus (\d and _).

Or, you could use the fact that ASP.NET supports Unicode properties:

^\p{L}+$

validates a string of Unicode letters of length 1 or more.

Answer 2

Including spaces:

"^[a-zA-Z ]*$"

Excluding Spaces:

"^[a-zA-Z]*$"

To make it non-optional, change the * to a +

Answer 3

You can use the regex:

^[a-zA-Z]+$

Explanation:

• ^ : Start anchor
• [..] : Char class
• + : one or more repetations
• $ : End anchor