Validator to detect untrimmed whitespace in strings

[Niels-NTG]

Is your feature request related to a problem?
Recently some users of the software I work on had a bug caused by dirty imported data, where some string values had trailing spaces. While the data did went to our Respect-powered validator system, we neglected to check for trailing spaces.

My estimate is that more often than not string values without leading and trailing whitespace is desired over strings that have it. Therefore it would be helpful if Respect Validation would offer a convenient validator function for it.

Describe the solution
A new validator function called HasNoUntrimmedSpaces() which passes if the input contains no whitespace characters on neither the start or end of the input string value. The definition of whitespace is the same as what the Spaced() validator uses (spaces, tabs, line breaks).

For example:

v::hasNoUntrimmedSpaces()->assert('username');
// Validation passes
v::hasNoUntrimmedSpaces()->assert('');
// Validation passes
v::hasNoUntrimmedSpaces()->assert('username ');
// Validation fails
v::hasNoUntrimmedSpaces()->assert(' ');
// Validation fails

I'm open for ideas for a better and snappier name than HasNoUnrimmedSpaces() 😉 .

Alternatives
Use the existing Regex(string $regex) function like so:

v::regex('/^\S*$/')->assert($inputValue)

or a chain of negated StartsWith and EndsWith functions.

[alganet]

Hi @Niels-NTG!

I think that new validator makes a lot of sense. Personally, I would call it trimmed and allow users to pass an argument $chars (with the whitespace ones being a default).

I'll let the idea sit in my head for a couple of days, experiment a little and wait for any additional feedback other users or maintainers might have on the issue.

Thanks for suggesting it! 🐼

[Niels-NTG]

Great to hear! trimmed is probably a better name that is not only shorter but also fits with the existing validator names.

[alganet]

@Niels-NTG I've implemented Trimmed in #1702, which is under review. If you'd like, I can guide you through how you could test if that PR suits your use case!

In that draft, I also changed StartsWith and EndsWith to accept multiple needles, so they can cover ltrim and rtrim like scenarios more easily. I thought about this, and even considered creating dedicated RightTrim and LeftTrim validators, but I found those to bee too niche (either one wants full whitespace-like trim or specific-char ltrim/rtrim). TL;DR I tried to strike a balance.