I previously posted this method for Mootools, and now here it is for jQuery.
Clients often ask to have a sorted list exportable via a link to a CSV file that they can open in Excel or whatever spreadsheet software they use. I could find two jQuery plugins for exporting table data to Excel, but I wasn’t comfortable with their reliance on producing popups (that could easily be blocked), or sending data as a querystring to a javascript function that sorts and formats the CSV. Here is a simple, plugin free way of asynchronously generating a .csv file using jQuery and PHP.
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If you find yourself needing to validate a URI, not just checking that it’s well formed with a regular expression like this:
/^(http|https|ftp):\/\/([A-Z0-9][A-Z0-9_-]*(?:\.[A-Z0-9][A-Z0-9_-]*)+):?(\d+)?\/?/i
…but actually verifying that the URI points to a functioning web page, the following code will do the trick. (more…)
Did I get you with the title? That’s right, it’s not possible to securely validate a form with Javascript. That is, you can’t prevent invalid data from being submitted to the server by using Javascript for validation. We’ve all seen Javascript-based form validation classes (and classes for Javascript libraries like Mootools, which is my favourite, so I’ll be making reference to it here), but it’s all too often not made clear enough to those who might use such classes that javascript validation alone provides no security against invalid data being sent to your back-end processing script and making it into your database.
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