Testing Strings

For A-Z and Hyphens

[unperturbed]

Hi,
How can I check a string is just made up of letters and hyphens. I've looked at preg_match etc but they don't seem to test for only letters and numbers.

Cheers.

[barns101]

preg_match should work, as long as your pattern is correct. I've not used preg_match myself but a pattern along the lines of ([a-z0-9]+) should match an alphanumeric string.

[whoisgregg]

A regex along the lines of

([a-zA-Z-]+)

should match just letters and hyphens.

[unperturbed]

Thanks guys i got a bit confused in the OP started of saying letters and hyphens, then went on to mention letters and numbers. What I'm really after letters and hyphens.

I'm using this code to test.

if (preg_match("([a-zA-Z-]+)", "abc")) {
echo "A match was found.";
} else {
echo "A match was not found.";
}

which finds a match but it also finds a match with.

if (preg_match("([a-zA-Z-]+)", "abc123")) {
echo "A match was found.";
} else {
echo "A match was not found.";
}

Which i don't want it to.

Cheers

[coopster]

You can negate the pattern:

$pattern = "/[^a-zA-Z-]/";

[unperturbed]

Thanks coopster,

Using the following code seems to work now, thank you.

if (preg_match("/[^a-zA-Z-]/", "abc")) {
echo "A match was not found.";
} else {
echo "A match was found.";
}