symfony form validation clean with regex before validate with regex - regex

Question

I'm using Symfony 1.4 and am a little stuck regarding form validation. I have a validator like the one below:
$this->setValidator('mobile_number', new sfValidatorAnd(array(
new sfValidatorString(array('max_length' => 13)),
new sfValidatorRegex(array('pattern' => '/^07\d{9}$/'),
array('invalid' => 'Invalid mobile number.')),
)
));
That is a simple regex for matching a UK mobile phone number.
However my problem is that if someone submitted a string like this: "07 90 44 65 48 1" the regex would fail but they have given a valid number if a the string was cleaned to remove whitespace first.
My problem is that I don't know where within the symfony form framework I would accomplish this.
I need to strip everything but numbers from the user input and then use my mobile_number validator.
Any ideas would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Answer 1

You may be able to do this with a combination of standard validators, but it might well be easiest to construct your own custom validator. There is a guide to this on the symfony website: http://www.symfony-project.org/more-with-symfony/1_4/en/05-Custom-Widgets-and-Validators#chapter_05_building_a_simple_widget_and_validator
I think it should probably look something like this:
class sfValidatorMobilePhone extends sfValidatorBase
{
protected function doClean($value)
{
$value = preg_replace('/\s/','',$value);
if (
(0 !== strpos($value, '07')) ||
(13 < strlen($value)) ||
(0 !== preg_match('/[^\d]/', $value))
)
{
throw new sfValidatorError($this, 'invalid', array('value' => $value));
}
else
{
return $value;
}
}
}
Save this as lib/validator/sfValidatorMobilePhone.class.php. You could then call it as
$this->setValidator('mobile_number', new sfValidatorMobilePhone());

Answer 2

I don't know Symfony, so I don't know how you would go about cleaning the input. If you can do a regex-based search-and-replace somehow, you can search for /\D+/ and replace that with nothing - this will remove everything except digits from your string. Careful, it would also remove a leading + which might be relevant (?).
If you can't do a "cleaning step" before the validation, you could try validating it like this:
/^\D*07(?:\d*\d){9}\D*$/
This will match any string that contains exactly 11 numbers (and arbitrarily many non-number characters), the first two of which need to be 07.