New in Symfony 7.2: Week, WordCount and Yaml Constraints

Week Constraint

This constraint validates that a given string (or an object implementing the Stringable PHP interface) represents a valid week number according to the ISO-8601 standard (e.g. 2025-W01). This is the same format used in the week HTML input field:

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// src/Entity/Rental.php
namespace App\Entity;

use Symfony\Component\Validator\Constraints as Assert;

class Rental
{
    #[Assert\Week]
    protected string $bookingWeek;
}

This constraint includes the max and min options to further restrict which weeks the user can select:

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// src/Entity/OnlineCourse.php
namespace App\Entity;

use Symfony\Component\Validator\Constraints as Assert;

class OnlineCourse
{
    #[Assert\Week(min: '2022-W01', max: '2022-W20')]
    protected string $startWeek;
}

Validating whether a week is valid or not is not as trivial as it looks because certain years have 53 weeks instead of the usual 52 weeks. Thanks to this new constraint you can now forget about those details and let Symfony handle the validation logic.

WordCount Constraint

This constraint validates that a string (or an object implementing the Stringable PHP interface) contains a number of words that falls in the given min-max range:

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// src/Entity/BlogPostDTO.php
namespace App\Entity;

use Symfony\Component\Validator\Constraints as Assert;

class BlogPostDTO
{
    #[Assert\WordCount(min: 100, max: 200)]
    protected string $content;
}

Counting words is a difficult problem to solve. That's why this constraint relies on the IntlBreakIterator class from PHP. This is also heavily dependent on the content language, so you can use the locale option to define the locale of the contents (by default it uses the same as the current application locale).

Yaml Constraint

Despite its quirks, YAML remains an extremely popular configuration language. That's why we've added a constraint that checks if the given string (or Stringable object) contains valid YAML syntax:

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// src/Entity/Report.php
namespace App\Entity;

use Symfony\Component\Validator\Constraints as Assert;

class Report
{
    #[Assert\Yaml(message: "Your configuration doesn't have valid YAML syntax.")]
    private string $customConfiguration;
}

You can also use any of the configuration flags defined in the Symfony Yaml component:

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#[Assert\Yaml(
    message: "Your configuration doesn't have valid YAML syntax.",
    flags: Yaml::PARSE_CONSTANT | Yaml::PARSE_CUSTOM_TAGS | Yaml::PARSE_DATETIME,
)]
private string $customConfiguration;