How can I limit the validate the input of a short text field for names not too rigid manner? I have seen very complex expressions in the Regular Expression Library but they seem very rigid and complex. I would like to work with something simple, but less prone to errors and easily adaptable by myself and others.


Any string that only contains letter a-z; A-Z; spaces " "; commas ","; periods "." ,"'"sign (as in: O'Higgins) and "-" (as in: Smith-Jones)should be considered as valid.

e.g. | Katharina A. Zeta-Jones | O'Higgins, Bernardo | J.F. Kennedy | Jan van Dam | jacky | should all pass.

Strings containing other characters and or numbers should be rejected.
e.g. Yours4ever | Love@firstsight | Jack & Jane | John + Emmy | would not be valid inputs.


Thanks for anyone who can give a hand

After some googling, puzzling and trying I came up with this one.

/^[a-zA-Z'-'\.\s\-]{3,40}$/

I learned:

\. = a period
\s = a space
\- = a hyphen

I don't understand the syntax for the single quote: ' but it's in there.

{3,40} means the string must be between 3 and 40 characters long to be considered as valid.

I hope this serves other non programmers as well

mapwork wrote:Thanks to share your experience, feel free to add this possibility to Regular Expression Library in the limesurvey documentation part, it's a wiki.

mapwork wrote:Please add this (and everything else you learned) to our manual at the regex wiki page, it will helpm other users a lot.

Thanks!