Greek language issue trying to use preg match

[bkeep]

I have a regular expression that works fine for anything us-EN and as far as I know it used to work with alternate charsets before something was changed, what that was I cannot tell you but I it is not working as expected

βαρίδι -> bob

function validateNames($name)
{
if (preg_match('!^([a-zA-Z]{3,25})$!', $name))
 return true;
return false;
}
//returns false
print validateNames(βαρίδι);
//returns true
print validateNames(bob);

Everything else works as expected if I don't do the check it will insert into the db and pull as correct encoding without issue.
I also tried setting ctype_alpa and setting a locale but that didn't work either.

utf8 is set as the charset

Can someone help point me in the right direction to resolve this
Best Regards,
Brandon

[edited by: eelixduppy at 7:44 pm (utc) on Jan. 17, 2009]
[edit reason] disabled smileys [/edit]

[eelixduppy]

Not sure you're going to get it to work with the entities of the characters themselves. Your pattern doesn't even allow for Greek characters, also, so that is going to be an issue, also.

When dealing with entities you should be decoding them before the pattern:

validateNames(html_entitiy_decode("βαρίδι"));

Although given your pattern this is still going to return false.

[bkeep]

Thanks for your reply I guess basically what I want to do is just make sure there are no numeric values in the entry for any language is there anything you have run across such as a list of known entities and there values

This problem gives new meaning to "it's all Greek to me"

Regards,
Brandon