Arabic Alphanumeric with spaces only regex

Question

I want to know the equivalent of the following, but for Arabic alphabet only:

$regex = '[A-Za-z0-9-[\]_+ ]+'

I tried:

$regex = '[ا-ئ0-9 ]+';

In which the first Arabic letter ا and the last one ئ. However, I have got the following error:

[phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: 
in file [ROOT]/includes/functions_user.php on line 1505: preg_match():
Compilation failed: range out of order in character class at offset 6

Answer 1

You can check if your Regex flavour supports \p{Arabic} or \p{InArabic}

try:

$regex = '[\p{Arabic}\d-\[\]_+ ]+'

Answer 2

You can begin to find the answer to your own question by taking a look and briefly reading the following:

• Regular Expressions Tutorial
• Unicode Regular Expressions

An equivalent regular expression would be the following:

~[\p{Arabic}\d[\]_+ -]+~u

Regular expression

[\p{Arabic}\d[\]_+ -]+     any character of: UTF macro 'Arabic',
                           digits (0-9), '[', '\]', '_', '+', ' ', '-'
                           (1 or more times (matching the most amount possible))

By adding the u modifier to the end of the regular expression, the Pattern strings are treated as UTF-16 and this also causes escape sequences to match unicode characters.

On a further note, by using \p{N} it will allow you to match any kind of numeric character in any script.

[\p{Arabic}\p{N}[\]_+ -]+

Note: It's more common to find a hyphen - placed first or last within a character class or choosing to escape it instead.