How to get validation errors in an array?

I am developing an REST API using Codeigniter. I need to have all error messages from Form validation in array format so that I can easily respond in either JSON or XML.

Right now Codeigniter is delivering error messages with <p> as delimiters (see below) but that is not good for a REST 开发者_Go百科based API.

<p>There was an error with this item</p>

How can I get errors in an array?

Thankful for all input!

The form validation library stores errors in an array and loops through them to generate the error string. They are stored in a private variable called $_error_array. You could extend the library with a simple method that returns the error array.

class MY_Form_validation extends CI_Form_validation
{
    function get_error_array()
    {
        return $this->_error_array;
    }
}

I assume you are familiar with extending core CI libraries, but this extension of the form validation library will give you a method to return the errors as an array with the name attribute's value as the key and the message as the value. I tested it out on one of my projects and it worked fine.

You can transform it easily:

/**
 * @param $errors string
 * @return array
 */
function transformErrorsToArray ($errors) {
    $errors = explode('</p>', $errors);
    foreach ($errors as $index => $error) {
        $error = str_replace('<p>', '', $error);
        $error = trim($error);
        // ... more cleaning up if necessary
        $errors[$index] = $error
    }
    return $errors;
}