Check for alphabetic character(s)

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- PHP Manual
- Ctype Functions
- Check for alphabetic character(s)

# ctype_alpha

(PHP 4 >= 4.0.4, PHP 5, PHP 7, PHP 8)

ctype_alpha — Check for alphabetic character(s)

### Description

ctype_alpha(mixed `$text`): bool

Checks if all of the characters in the provided string, `text`, are alphabetic. In the standard `C` locale letters are just `[A-Za-z]` and ctype_alpha() is equivalent to `(ctype_upper($text) || ctype_lower($text))` if $text is just a single character, but other languages have letters that are considered neither upper nor lower case.

### Parameters

`text`

  The tested string.

  > Note:

  > If an int between -128 and 255 inclusive is provided, it is interpreted as the ASCII value of a single character (negative values have 256 added in order to allow characters in the Extended ASCII range). Any other integer is interpreted as a string containing the decimal digits of the integer.

  Warning

  As of PHP 8.1.0, passing a non-string argument is deprecated. In the future, the argument will be interpreted as a string instead of an ASCII codepoint. Depending on the intended behavior, the argument should either be cast to string or an explicit call to chr() should be made.

### Return Values

Returns `true` if every character in `text` is a letter from the current locale, `false` otherwise. When called with an empty string the result will always be `false`.

### Examples

Example #1 A ctype_alpha() example (using the default locale)

    <?php$strings = array('KjgWZC', 'arf12');foreach ($strings as $testcase) {    if (ctype_alpha($testcase)) {        echo "The string $testcase consists of all letters.\n";    } else {        echo "The string $testcase does not consist of all letters.\n";    }}?>

The above example will output:

    The string KjgWZC consists of all letters.
    The string arf12 does not consist of all letters.

### See Also

- ctype_upper() - Check for uppercase character(s)
- ctype_lower() - Check for lowercase character(s)
- setlocale() - Set locale information
- IntlChar::isalpha() - Check if code point is a letter character