preg_match

Help, This is driving me mad and I know there must be a very simple solution. I’m trying to detect if my strings contain ONLY certain values. For instance, I’ m trying to limit my “$name” string to just a-z (case insensitive) characters. I’m trying to do this with preg_match (unless there is an easier way). However, I’m failing badly. This is what I have so far: if (preg_match ("/[a-z]/i", $name)) { echo "string only contains characters ranging between a to z"; } else { echo "string contains characters outside of the a to z range"; } This checks for the occurrence of any a-z characters in the string. However, want I require is for it to allow JUST those characters. At the moment if $name = “abc1” then True is returned (I want False returned here because of the “1”). I don’t know how to write this functionality in preg_match format :-( Please help Thanks James