PHP Regex - Must contain at least any 2 letters in UTF-8

Question

Right now, i'm trying to create a PHP Regular Expression with these following conditions:

Here is the Regex I have drawn up so far:

/^(?=.{2,16}$)[^@\s]+(?:\h[^@\s]+)*$/um

So far this does all of the following except that it doesn't meet the last condition which is that it must contain at least 2 letters. For example:

"..He" //should be true

"He$*" //should be true

".." //should be false

"*%" //should be false

"!#$%^&*()" //should be false since there is no letters

"$$tonyMoney™" //should be true

"أنا أحب جا™" //should be true

"To" //should be true

Any help is appreciated! Thank you!

Possible duplicate of Regular expression for password (at least 2 digits and one special character and minimum length 8) — Jay Blanchard
– Jay Blanchard, Commented Dec 7, 2015 at 21:44
@JayBlanchard no....just out of curiosity, I aint regex expert :( — Andrew
– Andrew, Commented Dec 7, 2015 at 21:44

Wiktor Stribiżew · Accepted Answer · 2015-12-07 21:48:49Z

You can actually use

/^(?![^@]*@)(?!.*\s\s)(?=(?:\P{L}*\p{L}){2})\S.{0,14}\S$/us

Here is a regex demo (modified a bit for a demo with multiline text).

For the regex to work with Unicode strings, you need to specify the /u modifier. For the . to match any character, you need to use /s modifier.

The regex breakdown:

^ - start of string
(?![^@]*@) - make sure there is no @ in the string
(?!.*\s\s) - make sure there are no 2 consecutive whitespaces
(?=(?:\P{L}*\p{L}){2}) - make sure there is at least 2 Unicode letters
\S.{0,14}\S - 2 symbols are obligatory, must start and end with a non-whitespace, from 2 to 16 characters long
$ - end of string

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