NYCPHP Meetup

[Hans Zaunere]

Hi,

> This is my first post to this NYPHP mailing list. So hello to everyone
> and thanks for the thorough discussions which help a beginner developer
> like me.

Hi Yogesh and welcome.

> I have a simple question. I want to validate first and last name. I
> assume that these are probably most common fields in any type of
> registration forms on websites.
> 
> When I validate these fields, I can't use ctype_alpha since these don't
> allow ' as in O'Reilly or Last Name with white space in it. I have to
> use a regular expression here. That's fine and I use it as well. Another
> method is to find a single ' or space,  trim it and then validate
> remaining alphabet characters. RegEx is slower and even in new
> filter_input, there is no way to validate these field types.

I wouldn't worry too much about the speed of regex (I'd recommend pcre_*
functions).

> Is there any other way to validate first and last names. It will be nice
> to have have inbuilt function for such commonly used field types. I will
> like to know how people tackle these issue.

But note that validating is all relative.  What if you need to support
various charsets?  I typically just check for strings without newlines and
non-printable chars.  For international sites, obviously, there are some
other loops involved.

H