I was wondering If I could get a regular expression which will match a string that only has alphabetic characters, and that alone.
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regex
In Ruby and other languages that support POSIX character classes in bracket expressions, you can do simply:
/\A[[:alpha:]]+\z/i
That will match alpha-chars in all Unicode alphabet languages. Easy peasy.
More info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression#Character_classes http://ruby-doc.org/core-2.0/Regexp.html
If you need to include non-ASCII alphabetic characters, and if your regex flavor supports Unicode, then
\A\pL+\z
would be the correct regex.
Some regex engines don't support this Unicode syntax but allow the \w alphanumeric shorthand to also match non-ASCII characters. In that case, you can get all alphabetics by subtracting digits and underscores from \w like this:
\A[^\W\d_]+\z
\A matches at the start of the string, \z at the end of the string (^ and $ also match at the start/end of lines in some languages like Ruby, or if certain regex options are set).
[a-zA-Z] should do that just fine.
You can reference the cheat sheet.
This will match one or more alphabetical characters:
/^[a-z]+$/
You can make it case insensitive using:
/^[a-z]+$/i
or:
/^[a-zA-Z]+$/
Source: Stackoverflow.com