Apostrophe issues with preg_match

Question

Hi first time question here ... I have the following pattern for preg_match that isn't working, which I have learnt may be an UTF-8 encoding issue ... or just my bad coding!

The following pattern works, but not for the apostrophe (with/without escaping the apostrophe makes no difference):

$pattern="/^([A-Za-z \'-])+$/";

The following pattern works for the apostrophe like I want it to, but it also allows the &, # and ; which is not ideal:

$pattern="/^([A-Za-z '\-])+$/";

This pattern works properly for all characters, however only allows one instance of the apostrophe in the input text string (and I don't understand the significance of 0* in the &#0*39;):

$pattern="/^([A-Za-z \-])+(\'|&#0*39;)*([A-Za-z \-])+$/";

Can anyone shed light on where I'm going wrong? I have literally been through a hundred pages looking for an answer and it's driving me crazy!

Answer 1

How about:

$pattern="/^([A-Za-z \-]+(?:\'|&#0*39;)*)*[A-Za-z \-]+$/";

Answer 2

have you tried: "/[^a-zA-Z0-9'-]+/"

Answer 3

You can use this code to check if the input contains ' then replace the apostrophe to empty like this

$text = "Welcome I'm Lan Danel";
if (strpos($text, "'") !== false) {
        $input= str_replace("'","",$txtComment);
}

the output will be:

Welcome Im Lan Danel