Regex to match only letters

Question

How can I write a regex that matches only letters?

Answer 1

If you mean any letters in any character encoding, then a good approach might be to delete non-letters like spaces \s, digits \d, and other special characters like:

[!@#\$%\^&\*\(\)\[\]:;'",\. ...more special chars... ]

Or use negation of above negation to directly describe any letters:

\S \D and [^  ..special chars..]

Pros:

• Works with all regex flavors.
• Easy to write, sometimes save lots of time.

Cons:

• Long, sometimes not perfect, but character encoding can be broken as well.