Re: Validating input

--- Ed Curtis <ed@homes2see.com> wrote: > I've been looking at the docs and found preg_match and > preg_match_all but these functions only seem to match 1 > specific search item. I want to make sure a variable (say > $mlsnumber) contains only numbers and no spaces. What > would I use to accomplish this? You mean only numerics? You can use ctype_digit(): http://php.net/manual/function.ctype-digit.php I write more about the character type functions here: http://shiflett.org/archive/84 There is also is_numeric(), if you want to allow any valid representation of a numeric: http://php.net/manual/function.is-numeric.php Be careful with functions like is_int(): http://php.net/manual/function.is-int.php They check the actual data type. If you're filtering data from the client (POST, GET, or cookies), then it's going to be a string, even if it looks like a number. However, you can use an approach like the following to make sure something is an integer: <?php $clean = array(); if ($_POST['num'] === strval(intval($_POST['num']))) { $clean['num'] = $_POST['num']; } ?> Hope that helps. Chris ===== Chris Shiflett - http://shiflett.org/ PHP Security - O'Reilly HTTP Developer's Handbook - Sams Coming Soon http://httphandbook.org/