Codeigniter, one of the fabulous PHP frameworks now available to give you a jumpstart on your PHP custom code projects, has, as of version 1.7, a really handy cart class. I was able to get a cart system up and running without writing a lot of custom code and concentrate on only the custom needs of the client’s particular business model.
Out of the box, the cart class would not accept some of my products into the cart, silently refusing to add them to the cookie. It was any project with a comma or quotes in the product name. Looking at the base CodeIgniter cart class, line 30(ish), you will find:
var $product_name_rules = '\.\:\-_ a-z0-9'; // alpha-numeric, dashes, underscores, colons or periods
and this variable is used in the _insert() function around line 186:
if ( ! preg_match("/^[".$this->product_id_rules."]+$/i", $items['id']))
{
log_message('error', 'Invalid product ID. The product ID can only contain alpha-numeric characters, dashes, and underscores');
return FALSE;
}
So, the upshot is that it doesn’t silently ignore your request, it’s logging the error, but not to screen (or to your future customers). The CodeIgniter forum users suggest that developers change the regular expression held in $product_name_rules to something that matches their needs, including some suggestions to set it just to ‘.’ (matching everything) directly in the libraries/cart.php Cart Class and call it done. This is not the right way. If you are anything like me, you’ll upgrade CodeIgniter to the latest and greatest in the next year, long after you forgot your core file change, and the client will loose sales on some of the products that contain strange characters. The real solution is to extend the Cart class by putting your change in your application/libraries/MY_Cart.php file. This change simply extends the cart class and lets you specify a new regular expression to match your online store’s product naming needs.
Here’s my new MY_Cart.php file, extending $product_name_rules to include commas, parenthesis and quotes in product names. Adjust recipe, bake and serve according to taste:
<?php
class MY_Cart extends CI_Cart {
function __construct() {
parent::CI_Cart();
$this->product_name_rules = '\,\(\)\"\'\.\:\-_ a-z0-9';
}
}
Hi Michael,
What if the product name contains slashes for example “1/2 lb”?
You should be able to match any characters you would like in the regular expression, in your case add \/ to the list. You could also make the regular expression match any character, but personally, I’d like to have some control.
Excellent solution thanks.
Hmmm,.. this is what I wanted to do, but in CI 2.0 it doesn’t work (and yes, i’ve put my MY_cart.php in the core directory)
Harold,
I’m planning on moving a site using the cart class from 1.7x to 2.x version on CI in the next couple months. I’ll update this post after I do that. I’d like to mention though, that you don’t put the MY_cart.php in your core (system) directory, but you put it in your application’s library directory. (in 1.7 it would go in system/application/libraries/MY_cart.php, while in 2.0 the application dir does not live in the system dir.) Hope that helps!
M.
Just what I needed. I totally didn’t realize they were filtering the name’s with regex. Thanks for this! I was was using rawurlencode() pulling my hair out.
Thank You for this fix!