I am trying to validate company names in PHP which should allow, periods, dashes, but not in the first or last part of the name. This is my code

!preg_match("/^[a-zA-Z'. -] $/", stripslashes($post['company_name']))

For now, it allows dashes and perios as first or last character of the company name. I need to DISALLOW periods and dashes as FIRST and LAST characters. How can I achieve this?

CodePudding user response：

Here is my answer where Alphanumeric can be First and Last, and periods and dashes CANNOT be first and Last

!preg_match("/^[a-z0-9](?:[a-z0-9'. -]*[a-z0-9])?$/i", stripslashes($post['signup_name']))

Thanks for the guys who replied!

CodePudding user response：

You just need to force a match to alphabetic characters at the beginning and end of the string:

preg_match("/^[a-z](?:[a-z'. -]*[a-z])?$/i", stripslashes($post['company_name']))

Note:

• if you use the i (case-insensitive) flag to the regex you don't need to specify A-Z as well as a-z.
• I've assumed you don't want the name to start or end with a single quote either. If you do, change the regex to ^[a-z'](?:[a-z'. -]*[a-z'])?$

Finally you might want to include digits (\d or 0-9) in the regex's character classes as there are many company names (e.g. "F5") that contain them.