User input validation for HTML title tag

[speedy33417]

I have to validate a user input to being a valid HTML title tag text. Basically whatever the user would input here would be used as the Title for a specific web page.

 

I would like to allow all characters that can be used for this purpose. I'm no good with Regex. I use the following code to validate user entry where only letters and numbers validate. How would I modify this script to use for the above example?

 

if (ereg("[^a-zA-Z0-9]", $userInput))

[newbtophp]

if (preg_match("/([a-z0-9\- ]*)/i", $userInput))

[thebadbad]

As long as you encode the text with htmlentities() or similar, it should be valid.

[The Little Guy]

ctype probably would work best in this situation...

 

if(ctype_alnum($userInput)){
    echo 'Good!';
}else{
    echo 'Bad!';
}

[thebadbad]

ctype probably would work best in this situation...

He's not looking to accept alphanumeric characters only:

 

I would like to allow all characters that can be used for this purpose.