Validating names

Names can be especially tricky to validate because there are so many variations. There are no industry standards or technical limitations, other than what characters are available on the keyboard. For this example, we have chosen to use Unicode in our regular expression because it allows us to match any character from any language. The Unicode property \\p{L} provides this flexibility. We also use  \\s-', to allow spaces, apostrophes, commas, and hyphens in our name fields. It is possible to perform string cleaning, as discussed earlier in this chapter, before attempting to match names. This will simplify the regular expression required:

public static void validateName(String name){ 
      String nameRegex = "^[\\p{L}\\s-',]+$"; 
      Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile(nameRegex); 
      Matcher matcher = pattern.matcher(name); 
      if(matcher.matches()){ 
            out.println(name + " is a valid name"); 
      }else{ 
            out.println(name + " is not a valid name"); 
      } 
} 

We make the following method calls to test our data:

validateName("Bobby Smith, Jr."); 
validateName("Bobby Smith the 4th"); 
validateName("Albrecht Muller"); 
validateName("Francois Moreau"); 

The output follows:

Bobby Smith, Jr. is a valid name
Bobby Smith the 4th is not a valid name
Albrecht Muller is a valid name
Francois Moreau is a valid name

Notice that the comma and period in Bobby Smith, Jr. are acceptable, but the 4 in 4th is not. Additionally, the special characters in Francois and Muller are considered valid.