A Comprehensive Guide to Laravel Validation

Introduction
Validation is a crucial aspect of web application development, ensuring that the data your application receives is accurate and secure. Laravel, a popular PHP framework, provides a robust and flexible validation system that makes it easy to validate user input. In this blog post, we will explore Laravel validation step by step, covering various validation methods with example code.

1. Basic Validation

Required Fields:
You can use the required validation rule to ensure that a field is not empty:

use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Validator;

$validator = Validator::make($request->all(), [
    'name' => 'required',
]);

String Length:
You can specify the minimum and maximum length of a string using min and max rules:

$validator = Validator::make($request->all(), [
    'username' => 'min:3|max:20',
]);

Numeric Values:
To validate numeric input, use the numeric rule:

$validator = Validator::make($request->all(), [
    'age' => 'numeric',
]);

2. Common Validation Rules

Email Validation:
Validate email addresses using the email rule:

$validator = Validator::make($request->all(), [
    'email' => 'email',
]);

URL Validation:
Ensure URLs are valid using the url rule:

$validator = Validator::make($request->all(), [
    'website' => 'url',
]);

Date and Date Format Validation:
Validate dates and date formats using the date rule:

$validator = Validator::make($request->all(), [
    'dob' => 'date_format:Y-m-d',
]);

3. Custom Validation Rules

Creating Custom Validation Rules:
You can create custom validation rules by extending Laravel’s validator. For example, let’s create a custom rule to validate a Canadian postal code:

namespace App\Rules;

use Illuminate\Contracts\Validation\Rule;

class…