I want to write a regex for first and last names, that will allow international characters such ass accented letters, and letters with omlaus(??)

 ex Černe, LindstrÖM, LaramÉE

 I am writing in php5 using ereg()

Hope this isn't too simple.

Thanks and Cheers in advance for any help.

Do you want to do anything with the matched characters?

Which characters exactly?  Refer to an ASCII chart if necessary:

http://www.asciitable.com/

I don't want to do anything in particular with the characters.

I want all international latin based characters to be allowed to pass through the regex which is being used as a filter for people creating a profile on our site.

I am implementing strict data screening/filtering in to prevent unwanted data in the DB, but I want to allow given and family names with international characters to pass.

I tried a reverse filter to disallow all non - alphas, but ereg() still filters the international characters.

Thanks

This loosely fits what I understand your requirement to be:

[^\xC0-\xFFA-Za-z`-]

But certainly you will find some unicode character(s) not in that set that someone somewhere will enter for their name, I guess if you don't need to support unicode then the above might be a good starting point.

Use preg_match instead of ereg, if your platform is PHP preg_ functions are faster.

Thanks for the advice - its got me going in the right direction.

Cheers