README

PHP Server Side Form Validation

This is a small PHP package that makes it easy to validate forms in your project specially larger forms.

Installation Guide:

You can install Validator either via package download from github or via composer install. I encourage you to do the latter:

{ 
  "require": {
    "azi/validator": "2.*"
  }
} 

##Usage to get started

• require composer autoloader

require 'vendor/autoload.php';

• Instantiate the Validator class

use azi\Validator;
$v = new Validator();

• Define Rules for each form field

  $rules = array(
        'name' => 'alpha|required',
        'age'  => 'num|required',
    );

• Run the validator

$v->validate( $_POST, $rules );

• check validator for errors, if validation fails redirect back to the form

if ( !$v->passed() ) {
        $v->goBackWithErrors();
    }

• show validation errors to user

 <label>Name :
      <input type="text" name="name">
 </label>
 <?=  Validator::error('name'); ?>

you can wrap error messages with custom HTML markup

  Validator::error('confirm_password', '<span class="error">:message</span>');

Rules

• required
• num
• alpha
• alnum
• email
• ip
• url
• min:number
• max:number
• same:field_name

Custom Expressions & Messages

• Custom Expressions

you can register your custom RegExp before running the validator

$v->registerExpression( 'cnic', '#^([0-9]{13})$#', 'Invalid CNIC number' );

registerExpression method takes 3 arguments

• expressionID - unique name for the expression
• pattern - the RegExp string
• message [optional] - the error message to be retured if the validation fails

Validator::registerExpression($expressionID , $pattern, $message)

• Custom Messages

you can also pass a custom error message with each rule

 $rules['full_name'] = "required--Please Enter your name";

Registring custom rules

this weekend (15th Aug 2015) i was working on a must have feature in validator which is accepting custom rules at run time. here is how you can do it from now on.

$validator = new azi\validator();
$validator->addRule('isUnique', function($field, $value){
    $query = mysqli_query("SELECT * FROM users WHERE username = $value");
    if($query->affected_rows > 0) {
        return "Username '$value' already exists please try something else";
    }
    
    return true;
);

now you can use this newly registered rule.

$validator->validate(
    $_POST, ['username' => 'isUnique|required']
);

now you have so much power on your fields validation do whatever you want in Closure you passed to Validator::addRule() as 2nd argument.

Conditional Rules

you can spacify conditional rules for a field

 $rules['age'] = 'if:gender[Male](required|min:2|num)';

Comparison Rules

you can also compare a field with another

  $rules['password'] = 'required|min:8';
  $rules['confirm_password'] = 'same:password';