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A Little Explaining
Some people might argue that this way of adding form fields with keywords is not the best method. They state that another array could be created to house all keywords relevant to each form field. Then simply in the validation process, each array can be called for each form field to determine how to validate.

I disagree with this method for several reasons. First, this Class is designed to be fast an non memory intensive. Creating another array will just eat up more memory, especially if your form gets large enough. Imagine a multi page form with 30 fields, some of which have multiple selections such as check boxes and radio buttons.

To create a second array housing all possible keywords will mean an average of one key for each choice. Then to link that array with each form field will take a little extra processing when validation; we would have to loop through each form field to find its associated keyword, then loop through it again to validate each keyword.

If you remember our validate( ) Method from Part 1, this would mean 2 extra nested loops, brining the grand total to 4. Indeed a lot of extra unnecessary overhead.

Even if we are using Regular Expressions, because our form field names are short, will usually be no larger than 25 characters, the pattern to match is faster than all the overhead suggested above combined.

One array is simple code wise and much faster and more convenient.

Form Field Names Without Keywords
Because we want to display our form field names next to the generated error messages without the keywords included, we have a special Method that does so, which you will remember from Part 1. Let's see some code:

We loop through each form field finding the last closing parenthesis. If you remember from Part 1, our keywords are housed in ( ) and they precede the form field name. So by finding the last closing parenthesis, ), and extracting all characters after it, we get the form field name alone.

Conclusion
In Part 2 here we covered how the Class can be used by the programmer and created several Class Methods to explain how to instruct the Class which form fields to validate as well as supported the methods we used.

In Part 3, we will create several validation Methods and take the Class on a test run to see how it works and how it can be used directly in a project.

A couple of closing notes; all our support was tested in actual environments and while the execution speed of PHP scripts will vary depending on the version used, server traffic, and connection speed, the results were pretty accurate over several tests. While this Class can be done in many different ways, we are happy with ours and we invite you, dear reader, to experiment and try other methods. After all the code is only as good as the programmer and we in no means are saying we gods. I am sure someone out there that is better than us can come up with a different method

- Tutorial written by Limitless

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