That name solution just checkes to see if there are letters in it, not that there are only letters in it. One regex to test that would be $who =~ /^([a-zA-Z])$/. That would give you the flexibility to later require it to start or end with certain letters, allow a - in the middle or a .

Example of how the two regex differ when matching a string.

use strict;

my $test1 = "abcd";

print "Testing: $test1\n";
print "Passed #1\n" if ($test1 =~ /[A-Za-z]/);
print "Passed #2\n" if ($test1 =~ /^([A-Za-z])*$/);


$test1 = "abcd1234";

print "\nTesting: $test1\n";
print "Passed #1\n" if ($test1 =~ /[A-Za-z]/);
print "Passed #2\n" if ($test1 =~ /^([A-Za-z])*$/);


# output
__DATA__
Testing: abcd
Passed #1
Passed #2

Testing: abcd1234
Passed #1
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___________
Eric Hodges