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Name regex tester

Test full-name patterns for O'Brien, Jean-Luc, accents and Unicode letters. Pick a preset, edit the regex, paste names one per line, then copy JavaScript or an HTML pattern snippet.

Why strict name regex is a bad idea

Names vary by culture, language and legal ID. A single ASCII regex cannot represent personal names around the world. Use regex only to catch obvious typos, then trim and length-limit instead of over-validating (for example maxlength="100" and required).

Recommended pattern

Default preset: ^[\p{L}\p{M}][\p{L}\p{M}' .-]*$ with new RegExp(..., "u"). Allows one-character names, single-word names, apostrophes and hyphens.

HTML name input

<label for="name">Full name</label>
<input id="name" name="name" type="text" autocomplete="name" pattern="[\p{L}\p{M}][\p{L}\p{M}' .\-]*" title="Letters; apostrophe, space, dot or hyphen allowed after the first letter" maxlength="100" required>

Use autocomplete="name" for autofill and the pattern attribute without ^ or $ (the browser anchors the whole value). Pair with required and maxlength.

Validate on the server too

const NAME_RE = new RegExp("^[\\p{L}\\p{M}][\\p{L}\\p{M}' .-]*$", "u");
const ok = NAME_RE.test(value.trim());

$name = trim($_POST['name'] ?? '');
$ok = preg_match('/^[\p{L}\p{M}][\p{L}\p{M}\' .-]*$/u', $name) === 1;

# pip install regex  (\p{L} support)
import regex

NAME_RE = regex.compile(r"[\p{L}\p{M}][\p{L}\p{M}' .-]*")
ok = NAME_RE.fullmatch(name.strip()) is not None

Always trim() first, enforce a generous max length, and treat regex as a hint—not proof of a real person.

Name regex FAQ