Pucadinga’s Blog

Codeigniter Framework

I love Codeigniter, it is my favourite PHP framework by far!

The new form validation library I found was missing one handy validation function, whilst it has checks for alpha, alpha_numeric, alpha_dash and many other usefule ones, it was missing one that would proven to be very useful.

The alpha_numeric_space or you can also call it alpha_space, where all alpha numeric characters are accepted, but with the addition of accepting the space character as well. The code is terribly simple, but I thought I would share it just incase someone finds it useful!

The way I did it is to extend the Form_validation library, so everytime you load the Form_validation library, this file would also get loaded.

Name the file MY_Form_validation.php, or whatever your extension prefix would be (default is MY_). The prefix can be found and changed in the config.php file.

This is the code to put in the MY_Form_validation.php:

<?php
class MY_Form_validation extends CI_Form_validation {
function alpha_numeric_space($str)
{
return ( ! preg_match(“/^([a-z0-9 ])+$/i”, $str)) ? FALSE : TRUE;
}
}

Now that was easy wasn’t it? You can now use the alpha_numeric_space as one of your validating functions just as you would use alpha_numeric or alpha_dash etc…

CI all the way!