As an alternative to the regular expression approaches already provided by
others, you could also use ctype_alnum():
if (ctyp_alnum($_POST['username'])) {
//username contains only letters and numbers
} else {
//username contains characters other than letters and numbers
} //if-else
Docs: <http://us3.php.net/manual/en/function.ctype-alnum.php>
As a bonus, this will likely be quite a bit quicker than the regex-based
approaches. That said, you'd have to be making many calls (e.g., inside a
loop) for the difference to reach the point of being noticeable. For
something like a one-time validation on page-load, use whichever you find
most comfortable.
In your original question, you also mentioned looping through a variable
to check for non-alphanumeric characters. The regex approach or the
approach I outlined above is much better in this case, but as a learning
exercise, you could do the looping like this:
$validCharacters = array('a', 'e', 'i', 'o', 'u');
for ($i = 0; $i < count($_POST['username']); $i++) {
if (in_array($_POST['username'][$i], $validCharacters)) {
echo 'Pass!';
} else {
echo 'Fail!';
} //if-else
} //for i
The key thing to note there is that you can treat the string like it's an
array to loop through it. For more information about this, go here:
<http://us2.php.net/manual/en/language.types.string.php>
and search the page for the phrase "String access and modification by
character".
Regards,
--
Robert E. Williams, Jr.
Associate Vice President of Software Development
Newtek Businesss Services, Inc. -- The Small Business Authority
https://www.newtekreferrals.com/rewjr
http://www.thesba.com/
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