Matthew Weier O'Phinney is back on the Zend Framework blog today with a spotlight on another component of the Zend Framework. This time he features zend-inputfilter, a useful component for filtering the data coming into your application from your users.

In our previous two posts, we covered zend-filter and zend-validator. With these two components, you now have the tools necessary to ensure any given user input is valid, fulfilling the first half of the "filter input, escape output" mantra.

[...] To solve [the single shot validation] problem, Zend Framework provides zend-inputfilter. An input filter aggregates one or more inputs, any one of which may also be another input filter, allowing you to validate complex, multi-set, and nested set values.

As in the other tutorials in the series, Matthew walks you through the installation of the component via Composer and briefly describes how it operates. He then includes a code example of creating a new InputFilter instance, making inputs, attaching validators to them and then ensuring everything validates in the chain with an isValid call. He then covers input specifications - configurations based on array values - to define validators on the input elements. He ends the post looking at input filters, how to manage them and defining them by specification. He also mentions a few other pieces fo functionality the component includes but he didn't cover here.