Regex to match only letters

Question

How can I write a regex that matches only letters

User · Answer

You can try this regular expression      W d   or  a-zA-Z

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Use character groups   D   Matches any character except digits 0-9    D     See example here

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Just use  w or   alpha    It is an escape sequences which matches only symbols which might appear in words

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If you mean any letters in any character encoding  then a good approach might be to delete non-letters like spaces  s  digits  d  and other special characters like             amp                      more special chars        Or use negation of above negation to directly describe any letters    S  D and       special chars      Pros    Works with all regex flavors  Easy to write  sometimes save lots of time    Cons    Long  sometimes not perfect  but character encoding can be broken as well

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So  I ve been reading a lot of the answers  and most of them don t take exceptions into account  like letters with accents or diaeresis              etc    I made a function in typescript that should be pretty much extrapolable to any language that can use RegExp  This is my personal implementation for my use case in typescript  What I basically did is add ranges of letters with each kind of symbol that I wanted to add  I also converted the char to upper case before applying the RegExp  which saves me some work  function isLetter char  string   boolean     return char toUpperCase   match   A-Z  -    -   s         null     If you want to add another range of letters with another kind of accent  just add it to the regex  Same goes for special symbols  I implemented this function with TDD and I can confirm this works with  at least  the following cases      character   isLetter        A          true         e          true                     true                     true                     true                     true                    false                    false         quot   quot          false                    false

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JavaScript If you want to return matched letters    Example 123   match   A-Z  gi       Result    quot E quot    quot x quot    quot a quot    quot m quot    quot p quot    quot l quot    quot e quot   If you want to replace matched letters with stars       for example    Example 123   replace   A-Z  gi         Result   quot        123 quot

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You would use    a-z  gi     --checks for any characters between given inputs  a-z---covers the entire alphabet  g-----globally throughout the whole string  i-----getting upper and lowercase

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In python  I have found the following to work     W d    This works because we are creating a new character class  the     which excludes     any character from the class  W  everything NOT in  a-zA-Z0-9     also excludes any digit   d  and also excludes the underscore      That is  we have taken the character class  a-zA-Z0-9   and removed the 0-9 and   bits  You might ask  wouldn t it just be easier to write  a-zA-Z  then  instead of    W d    You would be correct if dealing only with ASCII text  but when dealing with unicode text    W Matches any character which is not a word character  This is the opposite of  w   gt  If the ASCII flag is used this becomes the equivalent of   a-zA-Z0-9       from the python re module documentation That is  we are taking everything considered to be a word character in unicode  removing everything considered to be a digit character in unicode  and also removing the underscore  For example  the following code snippet import re regex    quot    W d   quot  test string    quot A     gt  gt       amp    amp    amp   Bsfa1 203974 quot  re findall regex  test string   Returns   A    B    s    f    a

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pattern     a-zA-Z    puts   a-zA-Z     pattern match  mine blossom      OK  puts   a-zA-Z     pattern match  456      puts   a-zA-Z     pattern match        puts   a-zA-Z     pattern match       amp        puts   a-zA-Z     pattern match       amp  A           OK

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Lately I have used this pattern in my forms to check names of people  containing letters  blanks and special characters like accent marks   pattern   A-z  -   s

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The closest option available is     u l     which matches a sequence of uppercase and lowercase letters  However  it is not supported by all editors languages  so it is probably safer to use    a-zA-Z     as other users suggest

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A-z     test  asd      true     A-z     test  asd0      false     A-z     test  0asd      false

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Java   String s   abcdef    if s matches   a-zA-Z            System out println  string only contains letters

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p L  matches anything that is a Unicode letter if you re interested in alphabets beyond the Latin one

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Use a character set   a-zA-Z  matches one letter from A   Z in lowercase and uppercase   a-zA-Z   matches one or more letters and   a-zA-Z    matches only strings that consist of one or more letters only    and   mark the begin and end of a string respectively    If you want to match other letters than A   Z  you can either add them to the character set   a-zA-Z                 Or you use predefined character classes like the Unicode character property class  p L  that describes the Unicode characters that are letters

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Pattern pattern   Pattern compile    a-zA-Z        if  pattern matcher  a   find             do something

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a-zA-Z      Super simple example  Regular expressions are extremely easy to find online   http   www regular-expressions info reference html

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For PHP  following will work fine      a-zA-Z

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Depending on your meaning of  character        A-Za-z  - all letters  uppercase and lowercase            0-9  - all non-digit characters

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Regular expression which few people has written as     a-zA-Z   i  is not correct because at the last they have mentioned  i which is for case insensitive and after matching for first time it will return back  Instead of  i just use  g which is for global and you also do not have any need to put     for starting and ending     a-zA-Z   g     a-z    match a single character present in the list below Quantifier    Between one and unlimited times  as many times as possible  giving back as needed a-z a single character in the range between a and z  case sensitive  A-Z a single character in the range between A and Z  case sensitive  g modifier  global  All matches  don t return on first match

[regex] Regex to match only letters

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