How to validate words count in laravel

Question

I am trying to see how can I validate words count in laravel , for example if a text area accepts only 250 words?

Could some one help me I am using laravel 4.1

Thanks

Answer 1

For Laravel 5.1 and using the advice of Lisa and Richard Le Poidevin, I did the nexts steps based on Laravel 5.1: Validation Docs and all works fine and clean:

Created a new ValidatorServiceProvider extending Service Provider in "app/Providers/" for all the validation rules including the Validator::extend method that does the validation and the Validator::replacer that returns a formmated message so we can tell the user the word limit.

namespace App\Providers;

use Validator;
use Illuminate\Support\ServiceProvider;

class ValidatorServiceProvider extends ServiceProvider
    {
    /**
     * Bootstrap any application services.
     *
     * @return void
     */
    public function boot(){
        Validator::extend('maxwords', function($attribute, $value, $parameters, $validator) {
            $words = preg_split( '@\s+@i', trim( $value ) );
            if ( count( $words ) <= $parameters[ 0 ] ) {
                return true;
            }
            return false;
        });
        Validator::replacer('maxwords', function($message, $attribute, $rule, $parameters) {
            return str_replace(':maxwords', $parameters[0], $message);
        });
    }

    /**
     * Register any application services.
     *
     * @return void
     */
    public function register(){
        //
    }
}

Then, register the Service Provider in config/app.php:

App\Providers\ValidatorServiceProvider::class,

For the validation language response is resources/lang/en/validation.php:

"maxwords" => "This field must have less than :maxwords words.",