String validation killing me

jasonyoung

Hello everybody. I'm trying something which seems so simple to do yet just can't seem to figure it out.

I'm presenting a form which collects MAC addresses. The vendor portion is always the same (001036) so I only ask for the last six chars. What I need to do is validate the entries only contain 0-9 A-F or a-f. I've tried ereg with zero luck. Can anybody offer me guidance?

I've tried

if (ereg('[0-9A-Fa-f]', $mac1)) {echo 'valid';} else {echo 'invalid';}

with no luck. It's close though. What it's doing is allowing the form to procede so long as one charactor is valid. I need it to check all chars in the string.

Thanks.

NogDog

That sort of thing is often easier to do via a negated character class:

if(ereg('[^0-9A-Fa-f]', $mac1))
{
  echo 'invalid';
}
else
{
  echo 'valid';
}

jasonyoung

Thanks, I see what you mean. The only other thing I can't get past is ensuring the user doesn't enter the same MAC address twice (or more). I thought I could put all of the MACs into an array and then check the array for duplicate values, but that too has proven to be more than I can figure out. I want to check this BEFORE updating SQL.

Any ideas?

Thanks again.

bradgrafelman

Try using [man]in_array/man (or even [man]array_search/man ) to see if a value already exists in the array?

jasonyoung

Still think I'm missing something here. I have this:

if ($x2 > 1) {
  $mac2 = $vendormac . $macsuffix2;
  $mac2Stripped = str_replace(":", "", $vendormac . $macsuffix2);
  $macArray[] = $mac2Stripped;
    if (!preg_match('/^[0-9A-Fa-f]{6,6}$/i', $macEreg2)) {$errors[] = "<b>You screwed up 2.</b>";}
	if (in_array($mac2Stripped, $macArray), true)) {echo "Duplicate MAC\n";} else {echo "NO DUPES FOUND";}
	}

Still no worky.
Where am I going wrong? In production, I would only want to add the error to the $errors[] array like the preg_match line above it.

jasonyoung

GOT IT!! Thanks everybody. This board is the best!

if ($x2 > 1) {
  $mac2 = $vendormac . $macsuffix2;
  $mac2Stripped = str_replace(":", "", $vendormac . $macsuffix2);
  $macArray[] = $mac2Stripped;
    if (!preg_match('/^[0-9A-Fa-f]{6,6}$/i', $macEreg2)) {$errors[] = "<b>Extension " . $x2 . "'s MAC address (<b>" . $mac2 . "</b>) is contains invalid characters or is not the correct length.</b>";}
		if(!array_search($mac2Stripped, $macArray)) {$errors2[] = "<b>Extension " . $x2 . "'s MAC address (<b>" . $mac2 . "</b>) is a duplicate.  Another extension already has this MAC.</b>";}}