Laravel 4 Form Validation should be unique on update form, but not if current

Question

I am trying to validate an update user profile form, whereby the validation should check that the email doesn\'t exist already, but disregard if the users existing email remains

Answer 1

You can accomplish this with the sometimes function of the validator

Something like:

$validator->sometimes('email', 'unique:users,email', function ($input) {
    return $input->email == Input::get('email');
});

See http://laravel.com/docs/4.2/validation#conditionally-adding-rules for more info