Laravel/Lumen email trimming for api - php

Question

I am developing an api using Laravel/Lumen. I have seen very few users are complaining that even though their emails are completely fine, my api response says The email must be a valid email address.
What I have seen is that they are giving a space by mistake after their email like 'noob#user.com '. As a result the email is not accepted by the system. What I'm using in my code so far is:
try {
$this->validate($request, [
'first_name' => 'required|min:3|max:40',
'last_name' => 'required|min:3|max:40',
'email' => 'required|email|unique:clients,email',
'profile_photo' => ''
]);
} catch (ValidationException $e) {
return response()->json($this->clientTransformer->validationFailed($e), 200);
}
I have tried adding the following lines inside the first line of try block but failed to change the $request object property.
try{
$request->email = trim($request->email, ' '); //<= or
$request->email = str_replace(' ', '', $request->email); // <= this line
$this->validate($request, [
'first_name' => 'required|min:3|max:40',
'last_name' => 'required|min:3|max:40',
'email' => 'required|email|unique:clients,email',
'profile_photo' => ''
]);
}
but these arent working. this is passing the exact same email to the validate method. Is there any quick way to do it?

Answer 1

You can use:
$request->replace(array('email' => trim($request->email)));
or
$request->merge(array('email' => trim($request->email)));
Source:
https://laracasts.com/discuss/channels/general-discussion/laravel-5-modify-input-before-validation