Form submit using wrong path

[eluser]williamparry[/eluser]
I'm a bit confused about how the validation ties in with post. I have:

Code:

$rules['firstName'] = "trim|required|xss_clean";

If I do

Code:

$this->input->post('firstName');

Will that give me the post variable with the cleaning and validation done?

I've got a registration model set up that is going to deal with the adding and I am not sure how to go about passing the information from the controller to the model. At the moment I am calling the model and running my model's adding function with the argument being $_POST but I don't need some of the fields. Should I do this all by hand and also, can I pass the validated and sanitised post data into the model, rather than raw $_POST without manual coding?

Cheers