note 51204 added to function.preg-match

If you want to match all alphanumerical characters plus special chars (umlauts) from several languages, the following might be a better solution, than writing a huge regex wich covers all special chars you need. Covering several languages at once can be interesting for name fields for example or for multilingual websites (someone has a name with a swedish special char and he wants to fill out a german form with validation on it). This example covers all special chars of German, Dutch, French, Portugese, Spanish, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian and Swedish: // use setlocale (as mentioned above by reiner keller), but assign several language codes to it: setlocale (LC_ALL, 'de_DE', 'nl_NL', 'fr_FR', 'pt_PT', 'es_ES', 'da_DK', 'fi_FI', 'no_NO', 'sv_SV'); // a form was send: if (preg_match("/^[[:alpha:]]+$/",$_POST['field'])) { echo "<br>matches"; } else { echo "<br>does not match"; } I tested this code on SuSE9.1 only. On a different system, the language codes might be a little different. ---- Manual Page -- http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.preg-match.php Edit -- http://master.php.net/manage/user-notes.php?action=edit+51204 Delete: added to the manual -- http://master.php.net/manage/user-notes.php?action=delete+51204&report=yes&reason=added+to+the+manual Delete: bad code -- http://master.php.net/manage/user-notes.php?action=delete+51204&report=yes&reason=bad+code Delete: spam -- http://master.php.net/manage/user-notes.php?action=delete+51204&report=yes&reason=spam Delete: useless -- http://master.php.net/manage/user-notes.php?action=delete+51204&report=yes&reason=useless Delete: other reasons -- http://master.php.net/manage/user-notes.php?action=delete+51204&report=yes Reject -- http://master.php.net/manage/user-notes.php?action=reject+51204&report=yes Search -- http://master.php.net/manage/user-notes.php