[Question] Use the rule patterns somewhere else

[PvanGarderen]

Hi! First of all, thank you for creating this package, it’s really helpful!

My problem

We’re building an application that processes user information, and we use the PostalCode rule to validate the postal codes provided in requests. The validation itself works perfectly, but I’m struggling with one thing: I’m generating a Swagger (OpenAPI) documentation for our APIs, and in it, I’d like to specify a pattern for the postal code like this:

new OA\Property(
    property: 'postal_code', 
    type: 'string', 
    pattern: '^\d{4}[A-Z]{2}$'
),

But now I want to match the pattern used in Intervention\Validation\Rules\Postalcode, which seems a bit difficult. Besides, the pattern function is private, and it doesn't seem to accept functions in the Swagger documentation anyway. I'm currently using a public constant or an enum.

My questions

Has anyone had the same problem in the past? Did you solve it in some way, or did you just hardcode the pattern in your docs and hope it never changes within the package? Is there a way to fetch the pattern(s) that I just didn't see before?

Hope someone can help me out, Thnx

[hiSandog]

Exposing one raw private regex may not be enough because postal-code rules are country-specific and PHP regex syntax is not always portable to OpenAPI's pattern dialect. A small public metadata API such as Postalcode::patternFor($country) (or a general schema descriptor) could make the validation rule the source of truth while allowing the documentation adapter to omit or translate unsupported constructs. Tests should verify that examples accepted by the validator are also accepted by the exported pattern for each supported country.