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up vote 0 down vote favorite

I am trying to use regex to detect when a user enters something like "Bob & Jane" or "Bob and Jane".

I have tried the following and all of them are trigged when something like "andy" or "andrew" are entered:

/^[a-zA-Z]( & | and )[a-zA-Z]$/

/(" "and" "|" "&" ")/

/( and | & )/

(I tried all these with and without the '^' and '$')

Thank you in Advanced for you thoughts!

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Use and\b to match the word and when the character after it causes a word boundary. –  scragar Jun 19 '14 at 15:27

3 Answers 3

up vote 2 down vote

The second approach seems good but the quotes confuse the regex engine. Use whitespace token instead:

/[a-z]+(\sand\s|\s&\s)[a-z]+/
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1  
That wouldn't detect Bob & Jane. –  Amal Murali Jun 19 '14 at 15:31
    
This is just for and or & part, obviously. –  Marcell Fülöp Jun 19 '14 at 15:33
    
No. Before the edit, it wouldn't have detected Bob & Jane. Now it should, though. And the regex can be just \b\s*(&|and)\s*\b — see demo. –  Amal Murali Jun 19 '14 at 15:37
    
These all seem to be triggered upon 'andy' or 'andrea' being enterd. –  user3692109 Jun 19 '14 at 17:01
up vote 2 down vote

What part of the expression do you wish to capture?

(\&|\band\b)

will not look for whitespace, but will look for either the & symbol OR and which is broken apart by some kind of word boundary (like whitespace) (live example).

You might see the code for this as:

$re = '/(\&|\band\b)/mi'; 
$str = 'Bob & Jane\nBob and Jane\nAndy and Andrew\nFrank Anderson & Michael\nWhere is Waldo && Carmen Sandiego and Crew & Oliver and Company\n'; 
preg_match_all($re, $str, $matches);

If you wish to capture the names themselves, you can always expand this, although names are very hard to define easily.

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up vote 1 down vote

I would personnaly use:

/^\w+\s(&|and)\s\w+$/

This way you don't have to repeat the spaces around the & / and.

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