Question

I need to validate submitted form data:

1. To check whether fields are empty.
2. Proceed to validate non-empty data.

x – allows only spaces, underscore, aplha numeric characters.
y – checks whether it is an image or not.

I’m using below code, it does not work. It is not validating and printing error.

<?php
$validate = array(
    '/^[a-z\d ]{4,20}$/i' => array('$x' => 'Please enter valid name.'),
    '/^[a-z\d ]{4,20}$/i' => array('$y' => 'Please enter a real category.')
);

$error = '';

foreach ($validate as $key => $field)
{
    if (preg_match($key,$field[0]))
    {
       $error.= $field[0];
    }
}

if ($error)
{
    echo $error;
    exit;
}

Answer 1

You’re matching your regex against your error message, not your submitted strings ($x and $y).

You probably ment to do something like this:

$validate = array(
    '/^[a-z\d ]{4,20}$/i' => array($x, "Please enter valid name."),  //change here
    '/^[a-z\d ]{4,20}$/i' => array($y, "Please enter a real category.") //change here
);

$error = '';
foreach ($validate as $key => $field)
{
    if (preg_match($key,$field[0]))
    {
       $error.= $field[1]; //change here
    }
}

if($error)
{
    echo $error;
    exit;
}

UPDATE

how I would do it.

$validate = array(
    array($x, '/^[a-z\d ]{4,20}$/i', "Please enter valid name."),
    array($y, '/^[a-z\d ]{4,20}$/i', "Please enter a real category."),
    array($phone, '/^\(?[0-9]{3}\)?|[0-9]{3}[-. ]? [0-9]{3}[-. ]?[0-9]{4}$/' , "Please enter a valid phone number")
);

$error = '';
foreach ($validate as $validation)
{
    if (!preg_match($validation[1],$validation[0]))
    {
       $error .= $validation[2]; 
    }
}

if($error != '')
{
    echo $error;
    exit;
}

$validate now is an array of your fields, each expressed with it’s own array containing error message, regex to match it against and submitted subject.