Does anyone know of a good library to use for PHP form data validation? I'd like to avoid PEAR if possible.

Yeah, this is a weird question, but I'm sure that someone here does web development...

I may just have to write my own. It would be good practice anyway.

Posted by mazatapec Does anyone know of a good library to use for PHP form data validation? I'd like to avoid PEAR if possible. Yeah, this is a weird question, but I'm sure that someone here does web development... I may just have to write my own. It would be good practice anyway.

Are you talking about seeing if an email is in the right format (i.e., [email protected])? Because you can just use javascript for that. Check out this sitepoint article, and let me know what you think

Basically the rule of thumb (nowadays) with a web developer is, why refresh a page when you don't have to? Less clicks = more of a 'stay' rate for users. Hence why AJAX has simply exploded in the community lately. I mean, it's been around for a while, but Google really brought it to fame with things like Gmail, etc.

Anyways, good luck

Edit: And re-reading your original post: I absolutely hate PEAR. The idea is nice and all, but it just makes for an incredible amount of laziness and possible security flaws. If you don't know everything about the libraries you're using, you can be prone to making security holes on your site if you implement these libraries the wrong way. [of course, I'm not saying there are security problems with PEAR... but I am saying it encourages laziness - and moreover, encouraging, or rather discouraging, researching articles relating to php on the internet. It's just that you're able to say "oh, i need a library, let's go to PEAR".] end rant ;)

The problem with that is you can turn off Javascript and enter an invalid address. The data needs to be verified at the backend so that malicious users can't enter bad data.

This is also for user names, passwords, birth date, etc, and all fields need to fall within certain parameters (length, alphanums only, etc).

I can probably just check against regular expressions, but if I write it from scratch I have to be really careful (this step is just before a last-minute check and a mySQL database).