On 09/22/2011 10:36 PM, Robert Williams wrote:
> 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".
>
>
And if you want to go the loop way, you could use range() to fill values
in $validCharacters.
$validCharacters = array_merge(range('A', 'Z'), range('a', 'z'));
--
Nilesh Govindarajan
http://nileshgr.com
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