preg_match with international characters and accents

php preg-match non-ascii-characters
Vincent picture Vincent · Jul 25, 2012 · Viewed 13.1k times · Source

I would like to validate a string with a pattern that can only contain letters (including letters with accents). Here is the code I use and it always returns "nok". I don't know what I am doing wrong, can you help? thanks

$string = 'é';

if(preg_match('/^[\p{L}]+$/i', $string)){

    echo 'ok';

} else{

    echo 'nok';
}

Answer

Tim Cooper picture Tim Cooper · Jul 25, 2012

Add the UTF-8 modifier flag (u) to your expression:

/^\p{L}+$/ui

There is also no need to wrap \p{L} inside of a character class.

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