Validators

CreditCard Validator

Laminas\Validator\CreditCard allows you to validate if a given value could be a credit card number.

A credit card contains several items of metadata, including a hologram, account number, logo, expiration date, security code, and the card holder name. The algorithms for verifying the combination of metadata are only known to the issuing company, and should be verified with them for purposes of payment. However, it's often useful to know whether a given number actually falls within the ranges of possible numbers prior to performing such verification, and, as such, Laminas\Validator\CreditCard verifies that the credit card number provided is well-formed.

For those cases where you have a service that can perform comprehensive verification, Laminas\Validator\CreditCard also provides the ability to attach a service callback to trigger once the credit card number has been deemed valid; this callback will then be triggered, and its return value will determine overall validity.

The following issuing institutes are accepted:

  • American Express
  • China UnionPay
  • Diners Club Card Blanche
  • Diners Club International
  • Diners Club US and Canada
  • Discover Card
  • JCB
  • Laser
  • Maestro
  • MasterCard
  • Solo
  • Visa
  • Visa Electron
  • Russia Mir

Invalid Institutes

The institutes Bankcard and Diners Club enRoute no longer exist, and are treated as invalid.

Switch has been rebranded to Visa and is therefore also treated as invalid.

Supported Options

The following options are supported for Laminas\Validator\CreditCard:

  • service: A callback to an online service which will additionally be used for the validation.
  • type: The type of credit card which will be validated. See the below list of institutes for details.

Basic Usage

There are several credit card institutes which can be validated by Laminas\Validator\CreditCard. Per default, all known institutes will be accepted. See the following example:

$valid = new Laminas\Validator\CreditCard();
if ($valid->isValid($input)) {
    // input appears to be valid
} else {
    // input is invalid
}

The above example would validate against all known credit card institutes.

Accepting Only Specific Credit Cards

Sometimes it is necessary to accept only specific credit card institutes instead of all; e.g., when you have a webshop which accepts only Visa and American Express cards. Laminas\Validator\CreditCard allows you to do exactly this by limiting it to exactly these institutes.

To use a limitation you can provide specific institutes at initiation.

You can provide a single institute:

use Laminas\Validator\CreditCard;

$valid = new CreditCard(['type' => CreditCard::AMERICAN_EXPRESS]);

When you want to allow multiple institutes, then you can provide them as array:

use Laminas\Validator\CreditCard;

$valid = new CreditCard([
    'type' => [
        CreditCard::AMERICAN_EXPRESS,
        CreditCard::VISA
    ],
]);

Default Institute

When no institute is given at initiation then ALL will be used, which sets all institutes at once.

Validation Using APIs

As said before Laminas\Validator\CreditCard will only validate the credit card number. Fortunately, some institutes provide online APIs which can validate a credit card number by using algorithms which are not available to the public. Most of these services are paid services. Therefore, this check is deactivated per default.

When you have access to such an API, then you can use it as an add on for Laminas\Validator\CreditCard and increase the security of the validation.

To do so, provide a callback in the service option to invoke when generic validation has passed. This prevents the API from being called for invalid numbers, which increases the performance of the application.

use Laminas\Validator\CreditCard;

// Your service class
class CcService
{
    public function checkOnline(string $cardNumber, array $context, array $types): bool
    {
        // some online validation
    }
}

// The validation
$service = new CcService();
$valid   = new CreditCard([
    'type' => CreditCard::VISA,
    'service' => [$service, 'checkOnline'],
]);

The callback method will be called with the credit card number as the first parameter, the wider validation context as the second parameter and the accepted types as the third parameter.

The $context parameter will typically be the entire $_POST array, un-filtered and un-validated when it is available.

When used via laminas-inputfilter or laminas-form, the context parameter will be non-empty, but in standalone usage, the context must be provided manually if required:

use Laminas\Validator\CreditCard;

$formPayload = [
    'card' => '4444 4444 4444 4444',
    'other-value' => 'Foo',
];

$validator = new CreditCard([
    'type' => CreditCard::VISA,
    'service' => static function (mixed $value, array $context = [], array $types = []): bool {
        return true;
    },
]);

$validator->isValid($formPayload['card'], $formPayload);