Perl Regex not working

[johnuk]

I am looking to capture the users firstname, and I only want to capture characters so im using the preg_match function. The problem is with the code below, im not getting a match when typing in a simple name such as "john".

//Clean user input
$inString = $_POST['alias'];
$cleanAlias = clean_input($inString) ."<br />";

//Peform Form Validation!
$pattern = '/^[A-Za-z]$/';
$subject = $cleanAlias;

if(preg_match($pattern, $subject))
{
echo "match found";
}
else
{
echo "no match found";
}

[Jake Arkinstall]

What you're asking for by using:

/^[A-Za-z]$/

is the beginning, a single letter and then the end.

If you want multiple letters:

/^[A-Za-z]*$/

[johnuk]

hi, thanks for your reply! ive tried your version, but still not match

[Salathe]

Given the code in your first post, the $subject variable will contain the string john<br /> (assuming the cleaning function returns john) which clearly contains characters not in the alphabet.