I need a regeular expression for german words with ä,ü etc.
When I test this regex on this website https://regex101.com/
/^\p{L}+$/u
all is fine, but on my server I upload a CSV and want to parse the words. When I call with the word "Benedikt"
preg_match("/^[\p{L}]+$/u", $attributes[0])
I get false. The encoding of the CSV is UTF-8, when I convert it to ANSI, all is good but the ä,ü etc. is not shown correctly, so I think I should convert it to UTF-8. But why is it returning false?
The problem occurs because your csv file starts with a UTF-8 BOM. If you remove this, the regex works perfectly. I have confirmed it with this code:
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8" />
</head>
<body>
<?php
function remove_utf8_bom($text)
{
$bom = pack('H*','EFBBBF');
$text = preg_replace("/^$bom/", '', $text);
return $text;
}
$csvContents = remove_utf8_bom(file_get_contents('udfser_new.csv'));
$lines = str_getcsv($csvContents, "
"); //parse the rows
foreach ($lines as &$row) {
$row = str_getcsv($row, ";");
$firstName = $row[0];
$lastName = $row[1];
echo 'First name: ' . $firstName . ' - Matches regex: ' . (preg_match("/^[\p{L}]+$/u", $firstName) ? 'yes' : 'no') . '<br>';
echo 'Last name: ' . $lastName . ' - Matches regex: ' . (preg_match("/^[\p{L}]+$/u", $lastName) ? 'yes' : 'no') . '<br>';
}
?>
</body>
</html>
The regex match the text successfully, and the ü in Glückmann is shown correctly on the page.
preg_match() returns 1 if the pattern matches given subject, 0 if it does not, or FALSE if an error occurred.