I allow only one hyphen (-) in regex

Question

I have a text box where i get the last name of user. How do I allow only one hyphen (-) in a regular expression?

^([a-z A-Z]*-){1}[a-z A-Z]*$

Answer 1

Your regular expression allow exactly one -. but I assume that you want to mach "Smith", "Smith-Kennedy", but not "Smith-", to do this you just must move the hyphen to the second group:

^[a-z A-Z]+(-[a-z A-Z]+)?$

BTW, in almost all cases when * is used + is the better solution.