Dart regular expressions to check people’s names

The name of a person (in common languages) usually contains the letters A through Z (lowercase or uppercase), spaces, periods (in abbreviations), and may contain dashes.

Examples of human names:

Donand J. Trump
Geogre W. Bush
Walter White 
Brady Hartsfield 
Ken Pat O'Biden
A-Crazy-Name Saitama
Vegeta 

This is a simple regex pattern to check whether a person’s name is valid in Dart (and Flutter as well):

r"^\s*([A-Za-z]{1,}([\.,] |[-']| ))+[A-Za-z]+\.?\s*$"

Test it:

// kindacode.com
// main.dart
void main() {
  // Regular expression to validate a name
  RegExp rex = RegExp(r"^\s*([A-Za-z]{1,}([\.,] |[-']| ))+[A-Za-z]+\.?\s*$");

  // Expected ouput: True
  if (rex.hasMatch("Donand J. Trump")) {
    print('True');
  } else {
    print("False");
  }

  // Expected ouput: True
  if (rex.hasMatch("Brady Hartsfield")) {
    print("True");
  } else {
    print("False");
  }

  // Expected ouput: True
  if (rex.hasMatch("Ken Pat O'Biden")) {
    print("True");
  } else {
    print("False");
  }

  // Expected ouput: True
  if (rex.hasMatch("A-Crazy-Name Saitama")) {
    print('True');
  } else {
    print("False");
  }

  // Expected ouput: False
  if (rex.hasMatch("A wrong name ____ @! ?")) {
    print('True');
  } else {
    print("False");
  }
}

Output:

True
True
True
True
False

It should be noted that the above method is mainly for names of people in English-speaking countries.
If you use a language such as Chinese, Korean, Japanese, or another language that is too different from English, the above method may give less accurate (or totally incorrect) results.

That’s it. Futher reading:

• Flutter & Dart: Regular Expression Examples
• Dart regex to validate US/CA phone numbers
• How to create a Filter/Search ListView in Flutter
• How to Create a Stopwatch in Flutter
• Flutter Autocomplete example
• 2 Ways to Add Multiple Floating Buttons in Flutter

You can also check out our Flutter category page or Dart category page for the latest tutorials and examples.