Problems matching with preg_match on Swedish characters ÅÄÖ

[ChrisFredriksson]

Hey everyone,

I've been having troubles previously, some months to some year ago, with preg_match'ing on Swedish characters ÅÄÖ. I had no luck whatsoever after a few hours of trying different variations and today I wanted to revisit this as it is still a problem.

But I just can't figure out why it doesn't work, so I'm hoping you guys can help me out!

 

I have this preg_match;

preg_match('/^[a-z A-Z\Å\å\Ä\ä\Ö\ö\s*\d]+$/u', $variable)

and as soon as I have any ÅÄÖ in the variable, it just doesn't want to match on it.

Could you please help me out before I throw the computer out the window? 😥😥😥

What I want is to only allow a-z A-Z and the Swedish characters ÅÄÖåäö - it is a match for first/lastname of a person.

[requinix]

https://3v4l.org/ddIcd

Is your $variable using UTF-8 encoding?

[ChrisFredriksson]

Hi requinix, Thanks for the quick reply!

I do believe it must be using UTF-8.. But I think I've finally figured it out, before I saw your reply.. The $variable gets the data from a GET var and I preprocess this to make sure nothing illegal is there, it seems that I'm a bit too aggresive and filtering even valid characters 😂

When I tried just a regular $_GET it worked perfectly.. so at least I know where the problem is now.

Thanks however! I really appreciate the quick reply and I'm try and figure this out. If, or hopefully when, I find out the culprit I'll post here.

[ChrisFredriksson]

Yeah, found it.. it is htmlentities() that does it..