First name pregmatch

or maybe

if (!preg_match("/^[\p{L} '-]*$/",$_POST['first_name'])) {

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The correct answer to this question depends on the character set encoding.  What character set are you using?

utf-8

Hmm, Ray is right. I have my database set as utf-8 general and when I inserted josé into the database I get josé

Thanks, Ray

This is a hectic answer for my level of knowledge! Does one of these:

= '#'             // REGEX DELIMITER
. '^'             // AT START STRING
. '['             // START CHARACTER CLASS
. '\p{L}'         // ANY LETTER
. " '-"           // BLANK, APOSTROPHE, DASH
. ']'             // ENDOF CHARACTER CLASS
. '*'             // ONE OR MORE
. '$'             // AT ENDOF STRING
. '#'             // REGEX DELIMITER
. 'u'             // FLAG: ALLOW UNICODE
. 'i'             // FLAG: CASE-INSENSITIVE

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allow for the ´being inserted into the database correctly or is it the below? It's a bit over my head...

mb_internal_encoding('utf-8');
mb_regex_encoding('utf-8');
mb_http_output('utf-8');

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Aha, I get it now.

I used :

if (!preg_match("#^[\p{L} '-]*$#ui",$_POST['first_name'])) {

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And for my database connection I used:

$link = new mysqli($server_name, $db_username, $db_password, $db_dbname);
$link->set_charset("utf8mb4");

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All seems to work now!  :)

Bingo!

The way I wrote the REGEX used PHP string concatenation to build up the REGEX string one piece at a time.  I like to write REGEX and other complicated strings that way because it lets me add comments, and it's easy to change when testing.

Best of luck with your project, ~Ray

Makes sense to do that, I think I should try it!