laravel url validation umlauts

Question

I want to validate urls in laravel. My rules contain

"url" => "required|url"

This is working great. But when a user submits an url with umlauts, the rule check will always fail.

Chars like öäü etc.. are valid in German Domains. Is there a way in Laravel to accept these chars in urls?

Answer 1

Laravel uses filter_var() with the FILTER_VALIADTE_URL option which doesn't allow umlauts. You can write a custom validator or use the regex validation rule in combination with a regular expression. I'm sure you'll find one here

"url" => "required|regex:".$regex

Or better specify the rules as array to avoid problems with special characters:

"url" => array("required", "regex:".$regex)

---

Or, as @michael points out, simply replace the umlauts before validating. Just make sure you save the real one afterwards:

$input = Input::all();
$validationInput = $input;
$validationInput['url'] = str_replace(['ä','ö','ü'], ['ae','oe','ue'], $validationInput['url']);
$validator = Validator::make(
    $validationInput,
    $rules
);
if($validator->passes()){
    Model::create($input); // don't use the manipulated $validationInput!
}