Laravel ships with some good validation capabilities. Form request validation is a nice way to make sure http requests pass valid data. To validate stuff that enters the application in some other way validators can be created manually. Unfortunately this is kinda verbose:

$validator = Validator::make([ 'myDate' => '201502028' ], [ 'myDate' => 'date' ]); $isValidDate = $validator->passes();

We can do better than that by defining our own helper function:

function validate ($fields, $rules) { if (! is_array($fields)) { $fields = [ 'default' => $fields]; } if (! is_array($rules)) { $rules = [ 'default' => $rules]; } return Validator::make($fields, $rules)->passes(); }

Take a look at this Stack Overflow question if you're wondering where the function could be stored.

Once the function is loaded the validation from the previous example can be written like this:

validate( '20150230' , 'date' ); validate( '20150227' , 'date' );

Nice, 'n' easy! Because the function hooks into Laravel's validator almost anything can be validated: