When I started learning PHP (Back in the PHP4 days) validating data was always a pain (for me at least). Most of the resources available cited the POSIX functions as the most effective way of validating an email address or URL.
Thankfully since then, the PHP community has embraced the PCRE functions which are more efficient and are Perl-compatible. However the downside to PCRE (and POSIX for that matter) is that you need to know regular expressions, which for a newbie to learn can feel like walking through a minefield.
Recently though the Filter Functions have become a very popular method to validate data. This is due to their small learning curve.
How to use the Filter Functions
In this example (Using the filter_var() function) the filter function takes the data you input (For example: email@example.com) and will return either the data (if it’s valid) or false (if the data is not valid).
I’m sure most of you have watched Minority Report and thought that the computer interface they use in it is pretty awesome. But have you ever wondered how long it will be until we have a system like that available for the average user?
Google Chrome is well known for being very fast at rendering web pages, but based on an update on the Google Student Blog it appears to be mind bogglingly snappy. To give you a sense of how snappy, take a look at this video comparing Chromes rendering to the speed to a potato.
