validator.js VS zod

To keep the focus of this guide on building our chat app, I'll skip the steps in setting up certain dependencies, such as Tailwind CSS for styling, Nano ID for generating strings used to create a short URL version of an original URL and validator for implement URL validation.

express-validator is a set of express.js middlewares that wraps validator.js validator and sanitizer functions.

For emails, a robust email validator from a well maintained package such as validator would be a good idea.

Regarding escaping brackets and ampersands - would you do this prior to storing the value in the DB? This would seem like the only way to do it, otherwise you are looking at escaping after DB queries or escaping in the client, neither of which I like. React automatically escapes strings but it's not something I want to leave to chance, and I do not want "dangerous" data in storage. validatorjs's escape() function would seem the best fit for the job.

Sorry, are you referring to this https://github.com/validatorjs/validator.js as a wrapper

+1 for lodash! It's like a superpower once you realize everything it can do. Another good one is validator.js.

I'm taking a Javascript course at the moment, and while it's truly fantastic, parts of the Mongo stuff could use some updating (already had to course correct with some syntax). I'm now getting an error I really don't know what to do with, and SO isn't helping in this case. Per the course, we're using validator (https://www.npmjs.com/package/validator). Most relevant code file:

emailIsValid uses the helper method isEmail from the validator package to assert that the provided email is a valid email format

Zod is an open-source schema declaration and validation library that emphasizes TypeScript. It can refer to any data type, from simple to complex. Zod eliminates duplicative type declarations by inferring static TypeScript types and allows easy composition of complex data structures from simpler ones. It has no dependencies, is compatible with Node.js and modern browsers, and has a concise, chainable interface. Zod is lightweight (8kb when zipped), immutable, with methods returning new instances. It encourages parsing over validation and is not limited to TypeScript but works well with JavaScript as well.

Zod is a TypeScript-first schema declaration and validation library. It helps create schemas for any data type and is very developer-friendly. Zod has the functional approach of "parse, don't validate." It supports coercion in all primitive types.

Link: https://zod.dev/

You can check out their documentation here.

You can learn more about Zod on their website here.

In JS, it's a good idea anyway to use some JSON parsing library instead of JSON.parse.

With Zod, you can use z.bigint() parser. If you take the "parse any JSON" snippet https://zod.dev/?id=json-type and change z.number() to z.bigint(), it should do what you are looking for.

We will validate our input using client-side zod. Zod handles TypeScript-first schema validation with static type inference. This means that it will not only validate your fields, it will also set types on validated fields.

A word of warning: while discriminated unions are very powerful, there's an ongoing discussion on whether discriminated unions should be deprecated and replaced with a different API.

I was first introduced to Zod by Adam Bobrow - a colleague of mine and a dear friend. Adam was sick and tired from JavaScript's brittleness, and about two years ago he started migrating our code base to TypeScript. But that wasn't enough for him. He kept complaining: "What good are my types, if some other service decides to send me bad data and breaks my code?". That's when he discovered Zod.