Settings API Validating User Input

Hey everyone.

I’m trying to validate comma separated numbers as in the case of asking a WordPress admin to enter category or page IDs in a text input field.

The value entered may or may not include multiple numeric IDs so I need to validate both cases so:

a) 12

b) 123,456,789

someone may enter the comma separated IDs also like so:
c) 123, 456, 789

I thought this would work:

preg_match('/^\d(?:[,]\d)*(?:[,]\s\d)*$/', $input[$option['id']]);

then use the result in a conditional that will pass the value if there is a match to my $valid_input array

but it fails miserably I think my regular expession is wrong.

Could anyone help? Please?

srhnbr said
Hey everyone.

I’m trying to validate comma separated numbers as in the case of asking a WordPress admin to enter category or page IDs in a text input field.

The value entered may or may not include multiple numeric IDs so I need to validate both cases so:

a) 12

b) 123,456,789

someone may enter the comma separated IDs also like so:
c) 123, 456, 789

I thought this would work:

preg_match('/^\d(?:[,]\d)*(?:[,]\s\d)*$/', $input[$option['id']]);

then use the result in a conditional that will pass the value if there is a match to my $valid_input array

but it fails miserably I think my regular expession is wrong.

Could anyone help? Please?

@OrganicBeeMedia

thank you kindly for the reply but I don’t think you actually read my question

I was not asking how to use the Settings API but how to validate a particular user input!

Anyway I got it figured out. If anyone is interested here’s the correct regular expression

preg_match('/^\d+(?:[,]\d+)*(?:[,]\s\d+)*$/', $input[$option['id']])