Name Validation Special Characters With Preg_match()

[Tyson86]

Hey guys, I am new on this forum but have lurked around in the past and have learned many things, so first of all I just wanted to say a huge thank you to all those who help out and share their knowledge... it's greatly appreciated.Anyway, as for my question, I want to make sure a user inputs valid name into a form. Essentially just letters, spaces, hyphens, periods, and apostrophes would be valid characters. So my first function looked like this:if(!preg_match("#^[-A-Za-z' .]*$#",$string)){ $isValid = false;Which worked fine, however I realized special characters like "é" "è" "ê" such as in the city of Québec are invalid, which I need to allow. The code for the character "é" is & # 2 3 3 ; (without the spaces) so i changed my function to:if(!preg_match("#^[-A-Za-z\&\#0-9\;' .]*$#",$string)){ $isValid = false;This caused some problems, not to mention it allowed the user to enter characters #,&,; and numbers 0-9 for a name, which I do not what. I'm not too comfortable with the preg_match() function and I have no idea how to allow the special characters. Any ideas?Oh and also am I forgetting any characters that could be found in a name? I would of course also like to include the other special characters associated with letters a,i,o,u etc..Thanks for any help

[Synook]

Just put them in literally, it should work.

[Tyson86]

Unfortunately it does not work to put them in literally. I get this error if I do:Warning: preg_match() [function.preg-match]: Unknown modifier '2' in /home1/..........

[chibineku]

Does your document charset allow these characters as literals? Might be something to consider.

[justsomeguy]

What's the actual pattern you're trying to use? The main thing it looks like you're having problems with is that you chose a pattern delimiter that you're trying to use in the pattern. You can't use delimiters in the pattern, so choose another delimiter character.if(!preg_match("#^[-A-Za-z\&\#0-9\;' .]*$#",$string)){