Shell Programming and Scripting

I have a regex I'd like to implement and I believe it should be working and I have tested it on various websites that have regex testers but it always says the name is invalid.

#!/bin/bash -x

echo Enter the users first and last name.
read name

Code:

if [[ "$name" =~ "^((?:[A-Z](?:('|(?:[a-z]{1,3}))[A-Z])?[a-z]+)|(?:[A-Z]\.))(?:([ -])((?:[A-Z](?:('|(?:[a-z]{1,3}))[A-Z])?[a-z]+)|(?:[A-Z]\.)))?$" ]]

then
echo name is valid.
else
echo name is invalid.
exit 1
fi


If I enter Jon Doe then is should be valid.

I have no idea what regex tester you were using but this is a kind of regex I'd never even heard of before. This (?:[A-Z] syntax in particular is baffling. The ? is supposed to be a modifier, do you really want it to match zero or one ( characters? And the : will be matched literally, so the name will never be valid unless it has a : in it. And so forth.

What were you actually trying to do?

Thanks for replying.
Regular expressions are new to me so I was trying to use something I found on regexlib.
They have a tester there and I also used the tester on zytrax

I want the expression to accept John Doe and Mary Jones-Smith

but not accept

MarySmith
Mary
mary
mary smith
mary Smith
Mary smith
mary smith-jones
Mary smith-jones
Mary smith-Jones

(?:regex) is a non-capturing group as opposed to (regex), but it is not supported by bash I think. It seems to work in a recent version of ksh93 though (?: that is)...

BASH doesn't support that syntax.

Thanks.

Do you have any idea how I can accomplish the same thing in bash?

Don't need to back reference anyway right? Have you tried just removing all the "?:"