Hello I'm trying to write a regular expression for user name in my form.
The regular expression should allow spaces and . when the text is written
Ex : S. Harish Kumar
Check the regEx that I have written so far
^[a-zA-Z\s\.]*$
The above regEx also accepts any string with just spaces and . which I don't want. Can you help me with the perfect regEx which doesn't accept spaces and . when no text is entered?
Thanks in advance :)
Hello I'm trying to write a regular expression for user name in my form.
The regular expression should allow spaces and . when the text is written
Ex : S. Harish Kumar
Check the regEx that I have written so far
^[a-zA-Z\s\.]*$
The above regEx also accepts any string with just spaces and . which I don't want. Can you help me with the perfect regEx which doesn't accept spaces and . when no text is entered?
Thanks in advance :)
Share Improve this question asked May 12, 2017 at 10:17 HarishHarish 1,2738 gold badges24 silver badges47 bronze badges 1- Are leading/trailing dots/spaces allowed ? – abhishekkannojia Commented May 12, 2017 at 10:19
3 Answers
Reset to default 9Just disallow a string that only consists of whitespaces/dots:
^(?![\s.]+$)[a-zA-Z\s.]*$
^^^^^^^^^^^
See the regex demo.
The (?![\s.]+$) is a negative lookahead that fails the match if the whole string contains whitespace or dot chars only.
You could use ^[a-zA-Z].*[\s\.]*$
^[a-zA-Z]asserts string starts with a char (a-zA-Z).*[\s\.]*$followed by any char dot and spaces included
See following example:
var regex = /^[a-zA-Z].*[\s\.]*$/g;
function check(par){
console.log(par.value + " match: " + regex.test(par.value));
}Name <input type="text" id="test" value="" onchange="javascript:check(this)">I would say a name is a sequence of alphabetic chars delimited by spaces or dots, which can be defined by the following regex:
^[a-zA-Z]+(?:[\s.]+[a-zA-Z]+)*$
Demo: https://regex101./r/rH5jtc/2