Yii – Further model validation

UPDATED 26-Jan-2012 !

A brief note today to add some more specific validation to your models.  As we all know – “rubbish in == rubbish out”, so let’s get that data nice and clean, right up front!

 PHP | 
 copy code |
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public function rules()
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	{
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		// NOTE: you should only define rules for those attributes that
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		// will receive user inputs.
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		return array(
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	                 array('firstname, surname, address', 'match', 'pattern'=>'/^[\w\-\_\'\,\.]+$/'),</del>
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                         array('firstname, surname, address', 'match', 'pattern'=>'/^[\\w\\-\\_\\'\\ \\,0-9\\p{L}]+$/u'),
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                         array('startdate, enddate', 'date','format'=>'d/m/yyyy', 'allowEmpty'=>false),
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                );
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         }

The address regex pattern is using a short-code \\w which matches all alphanumeric characters including diacritics (letters with accents etc..).  Added basic puctuation, hyphen(-), underscore(_), single quote (‘),  comma(,) and full-stop/period (.) , 0-9 and lastly, if there is any chance that you might use multi-byte characters like utf-8, then the unicode point {L} matches any multi-byte letter. Note the /u at the end of the regex pattern which tells regex to use multi-byte matching. This combination should allow most european and amercian names and addresses like

 It may/should even allow other multi-byte combinations, but I haven’t tested it on anything non-european yet!

Please do add ideas for more validation rules below …

further reading:  Unicode Regex Patterns