Regular expression for only characters a-z, A-Z

Question

I don\'t know how to create a regular expression in JavaScript or jQuery.

I want to create a regular expression that will check if a string contains only characters

Answer 1

/^[a-zA-Z]+$/ 

Off the top of my head.

Edit:

Or if you don't like the weird looking literal syntax you can do it like this

new RegExp("^[a-zA-Z]+$");

Answer 2

With POSIX Bracket Expressions (not supported by Javascript) it can be done this way:

/[:alpha:]+/

Any alpha character A to Z or a to z.

or

/^[[:alpha:]]+$/s

to match strictly with spaces.

Answer 3

/^[a-zA-Z]*$/

Change the * to + if you don't want to allow empty matches.

References:

Character classes ([...]), Anchors (^ and $), Repetition (+, *)

The / are just delimiters, it denotes the start and the end of the regex. One use of this is now you can use modifiers on it.

Answer 4

Piggybacking on what the other answers say, since you don't know how to do them at all, here's an example of how you might do it in JavaScript:

var charactersOnly = "This contains only characters";
var nonCharacters = "This has _@#*($()*@#$(*@%^_(#@!$ non-characters";

if (charactersOnly.search(/[^a-zA-Z]+/) === -1) {
  alert("Only characters");
}

if (nonCharacters.search(/[^a-zA-Z]+/)) {
  alert("There are non characters.");
}

The / starting and ending the regular expression signify that it's a regular expression. The search function takes both strings and regexes, so the / are necessary to specify a regex.

From the MDN Docs, the function returns -1 if there is no match.

Also note: that this works for only a-z, A-Z. If there are spaces, it will fail.