Bug report: Poor empty value handling for default format validator?

[mondwan]

Description

Given I need to validate value is not empty, for example

• '': Invalid
• ' ': Valid

Problems

Option presence explicitly states whitespaces only is not a valid string. So I head to format.

However, default format validator always allows empty value (empty defined above) at the beginner which ignores my regex object.

Reproduce the problem

Here is the fiddle to demonstrate the problem: https://jsfiddle.net/8okbtbuz/

Given I have a regex ^.{1,64}$' which ensures there is at least one character, validator.single() always treat the empty value is a valid one.

Problematic codes spotted

https://github.com/ansman/validate.js/blob/master/validate.js#L948

It always return success for empty value. This is not good.....

[ansman]

This is by design, you have to use both presence and format to achieve what you want.

[mondwan]

Nope. Both of them does not work for me

By code,

https://github.com/ansman/validate.js/blob/master/validate.js#L759

For option presence, It always return false for empty string. (a string contains spaces only)

Code example,

var a = ['', ' ', '  '];

a.forEach(function (v) {
    console.log('value |%s|', v);

  // Presence on
    console.log('presesence on' , validate.single(v, {
    presence: true,
    format: {
        pattern: "^.{1,64}$",
      message: 'haha',
    },
  }));

  // presence off
    console.log('presence off', validate.single(v, {
    presence: false,
    format: {
        pattern: "^.{1,64}$",
      message: 'haha',
    },
  }));
 });

Output

value ||
presesence on ["can't be blank"]
presence off undefined
value | |
presesence on ["can't be blank"]
presence off undefined
value |  |
presesence on ["can't be blank"]
presence off undefined

Fiddler

https://jsfiddle.net/8okbtbuz/1/

Expected result

'' -> invalid, empty string
' ' -> valid, string with at least one space

[ansman]

Ah, I see your dilemma. I'll draft a solution.

[ansman]

@mondwan, @jpbufe3, @sckogi I've drafted a solution in ecde117, how does it look?
I see two main use cases, one is user inputted data such a form on a web page. It's easy to put an extra space somewhere which doesn't really qualify as having entered something.

The other is a server which should have strict parsing in which a whitespace string is very much defined.

[mondwan]

Hello @ansman , glad to see this patch. In my opinions, changes on format suits my need and the introduction of disallowEmpty on presence is quite good.

However, I have not checked out the changes on others as there are no real usages on my side. I cannot judge whether they are good or not

2 suggestions at last:

• Comments like here should be removed or updated. Otherwise, it cause confusion.
• disallowEmpty should be allowEmpty? This provides better backward compatibility?

Thanks for your patch :D

[sckogi]

Hi @ansman, I agree with @mondwan about allowEmpty. And it seems in spec is missing some cases like datetime([], {}) and so.

Thanks ;D !

[ansman]

@sckogi Datetime was changed here:
75ec791#diff-ed60d8ad61ec5449dd72bc2b36d651e1L47
75ec791#diff-de099361a37e0c86a01873666f829014L918

I've made the changes here: 75ec791

[mondwan]

Hello @ansman , may I know the date for releasing this patch?