While working on NoseRub I noticed (once again) that the validation of urls in the form of “http://somename.localhost” fails when using CakePHP’s built-in url validation rule.
To make such urls pass the validation we have to write a custom validation rule. As PHP (>= 5.2.0) already provides a filter for urls we can use this filter in our validation rule. And so the code in our model looks like:
public $validate = array('url' => array('rule' => array('validateUrl')));
public function validateUrl($data) {
return (filter_var($data['url'], FILTER_VALIDATE_URL)) ? true : false;
}
I hope this workaround is useful for some of you.
PS: If you are a German-speaking baker, a new blog called cakery (started by Siegfried Hirsch, the admin of the German CakePHP Google Group) could be interesting for you.
hey daniel, just a heads up, many of the links on noserub.com are broken.
http://noserub.com/tour/
http://noserub.com/discuss/
http://noserub.com/contribute/
all aren’t working for me.
HeyDaniel, thanks a lot for linking. My openID questions are not forgotten but a little bit postponed. Will contact you again.
Never heard of the function filter_var() function, thanx for your post! But just saw this:
“It seems that all FILTER_VALIDATE_URL is doing is calling parse_url(), which makes it effectively useless since parse_url() only fails on really malformed urls.
Will display: string(10) “http://…”
None of the flags help either, so you’re better off with regular expressions to validate a url.” From http://us3.php.net/manual/en/ref.filter.php#79412
@all: Thanks for your comments!
@Mark: It seems like Dirk already fixed the links, at least now they work ;-) Only the NoseRub blog is currently offline as it got “hacked” yesterday… It will be back soon. Anyway, thanks for the heads up!
@Siegfried: No problem, it is good to have a German CakePHP blog :)
@David: Thanks for this hint. I think the “problem” is that something like http://. is in fact a valid url. So in practice you probably have to perform some additional checks to ensure a stricter url format…