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

A problem with your regex is that it forces the user to put a -. You can use ? to make it optional :

^[a-z A-Z]*\-?[a-zA-Z]*$