Accent characters in regexp

So I had this 'nifty' piece of regexp that would check for valid names.
'Had' I say untill I discovered that it does not accept any accented
character like ë,é etc. I've been looking all over the place but cannot find
a clear answer as to the best solution for this problem. The only solution
that I get working sofar is by simply adding all possible accent characters
to the regexp, but I would assume there would be a more generic solution for
this ??

Anyway: below is what I have now, and it allows for a 'ë' in a string. The
only solution? Or is there indeed a better way?

PHP code:
define("VALID_NAME","^([A-Z]{1})([a-zA-Zë\s \-]+)([a-z])$");

Thanks for any light on this matter.

John

Laiverd.COM wrote:
> Anyway: below is what I have now, and it allows for a 'ë' in a
> string. The only solution? Or is there indeed a better way?
>

You can use the "w" character class, which matches both accented and normal
characters, as well as the underscore:

print preg_match('/\w/', 'ë'); // 1

As it appears that you only want to allow for spaces and hyphens, you could
do something like the following:

$word = 'éìë-';
print !preg_match('/_/', $word) &&
preg_match('/^[\w\s-]+$/', $word); // 1


JW