title: Laravel sometimes validation rule
body: <p>I am trying to validate a password field only if it is present. I want to allow someone to edit a user and they may or may not want to change the users password. So I thought I could this using Laravels validation rules, specifically the 'sometimes' rule. I have this set of rules:</p>
  
  <pre><code>$this-&gt;validate($request, [
      'password' =&gt; 'sometimes|required|min:8',
  ]);
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>This is simplified for the example, there will usually be other rules for other fields and stricter rules for the password. I expect this to only apply the min:8 rule if the password field is present in the passed data, but if I leave the password field empty I get a validation error saying the password field is required.</p>
  
  <p>I'm not sure what I'm not understanding in the docs. Do I need to manually remove the password field before validation if it is the form input was submitted empty like this?</p>
  
  <pre><code>$data = $request-&gt;all();
  
  if ('' === $data['password']) {
      unset($data['password'])
  }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>...and then pass the array into the validator. I think this makes sense but I could do with some confirmation that I'm understanding it correctly. Thanks in advance.</p>