Stripping Data Help Needed

[Ralph Freshour]

I'm taking text from a textarea object and want to strip out
characters other than A-Za-z0-9 before I send the data to MySQL table
- is there a function I can use to do this in PHP?

Thanks...

[Tom Thackrey]

On 12-Oct-2003, Ralph Freshour <ra***@primemail.com> wrote:

I'm taking text from a textarea object and want to strip out
characters other than A-Za-z0-9 before I send the data to MySQL table
- is there a function I can use to do this in PHP?

$strippedtext = preg_replace('/[^0-9a-z]/i','',$originaltext);

--
Tom Thackrey
www.creative-light.com
tom (at) creative (dash) light (dot) com
do NOT send email to ja*********@willglen.net (it's reserved for spammers)

[Ralph Freshour]

How would I handle special characters like single and double quotes?
forward and backward slashes?

Thanks...

On Mon, 13 Oct 2003 01:25:34 GMT, "Tom Thackrey"
<us***********@nospam.com> wrote:

On 12-Oct-2003, Ralph Freshour <ra***@primemail.com> wrote:

I'm taking text from a textarea object and want to strip out
characters other than A-Za-z0-9 before I send the data to MySQL table
- is there a function I can use to do this in PHP?

$strippedtext = preg_replace('/[^0-9a-z]/i','',$originaltext);

[Tom Thackrey]

On 12-Oct-2003, Ralph Freshour <ra***@primemail.com> wrote:

On Mon, 13 Oct 2003 01:25:34 GMT, "Tom Thackrey"
<us***********@nospam.com> wrote:

On 12-Oct-2003, Ralph Freshour <ra***@primemail.com> wrote:

I'm taking text from a textarea object and want to strip out
characters other than A-Za-z0-9 before I send the data to MySQL table
- is there a function I can use to do this in PHP?
$strippedtext = preg_replace('/[^0-9a-z]/i','',$originaltext);

How would I handle special characters like single and double quotes?
forward and backward slashes?

That will strip them out, too. It will remove everything but letters and
numbers from the original string. What the regular expression says is
replace every occurance of a character that is not (^) a number (0-9) or a
letter (a-z) both upper and lower case (i) with a null ('').

If you want to just make the string mysql safe but keep the punctuation use
addslashes().

--
Tom Thackrey
www.creative-light.com
tom (at) creative (dash) light (dot) com
do NOT send email to ja*********@willglen.net (it's reserved for spammers)

[Ralph Freshour]

I'm sorry I didn't think this through further Tom - while I wanted
initially 0-9a-z etc., after using this in a form (it worked really
neat!!), I realized that I needed to allow additional specific
characters such as {}[]<>

Ralph

On Mon, 13 Oct 2003 02:30:14 GMT, "Tom Thackrey"
<us***********@nospam.com> wrote:

On 12-Oct-2003, Ralph Freshour <ra***@primemail.com> wrote:

On Mon, 13 Oct 2003 01:25:34 GMT, "Tom Thackrey"
<us***********@nospam.com> wrote:

>
>On 12-Oct-2003, Ralph Freshour <ra***@primemail.com> wrote:
>
>> I'm taking text from a textarea object and want to strip out
>> characters other than A-Za-z0-9 before I send the data to MySQL table
>> - is there a function I can use to do this in PHP?
>
>$strippedtext = preg_replace('/[^0-9a-z]/i','',$originaltext);

How would I handle special characters like single and double quotes?
forward and backward slashes?

That will strip them out, too. It will remove everything but letters and
numbers from the original string. What the regular expression says is
replace every occurance of a character that is not (^) a number (0-9) or a
letter (a-z) both upper and lower case (i) with a null ('').

If you want to just make the string mysql safe but keep the punctuation use
addslashes().

[Tom Thackrey]

On 12-Oct-2003, Ralph Freshour <ra***@primemail.com> wrote:

On Mon, 13 Oct 2003 02:30:14 GMT, "Tom Thackrey"
<us***********@nospam.com> wrote:

On 12-Oct-2003, Ralph Freshour <ra***@primemail.com> wrote:

On Mon, 13 Oct 2003 01:25:34 GMT, "Tom Thackrey"
<us***********@nospam.com> wrote:

>
>On 12-Oct-2003, Ralph Freshour <ra***@primemail.com> wrote:
>
>> I'm taking text from a textarea object and want to strip out
>> characters other than A-Za-z0-9 before I send the data to MySQL
>> table
>> - is there a function I can use to do this in PHP?
>
>$strippedtext = preg_replace('/[^0-9a-z]/i','',$originaltext);

How would I handle special characters like single and double quotes?
forward and backward slashes?

That will strip them out, too. It will remove everything but letters and
numbers from the original string. What the regular expression says is
replace every occurance of a character that is not (^) a number (0-9) or
a
letter (a-z) both upper and lower case (i) with a null ('').

If you want to just make the string mysql safe but keep the punctuation
use
addslashes().

I'm sorry I didn't think this through further Tom - while I wanted
initially 0-9a-z etc., after using this in a form (it worked really
neat!!), I realized that I needed to allow additional specific
characters such as {}[]<>

all you have to do is add the extra characters to the pattern, except that
some of them need to be escaped like () and []

$strippedtext = preg_replace('/[^0-9a-z\[\]\(\)<>]/i','',$originaltext);

see
http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.preg-replace.php
http://www.php.net/manual/en/pcre.pattern.syntax.php

--
Tom Thackrey
www.creative-light.com
tom (at) creative (dash) light (dot) com
do NOT send email to ja*********@willglen.net (it's reserved for spammers)

[marius ursache]

Ralph Freshour wrote:

I'm taking text from a textarea object and want to strip out
characters other than A-Za-z0-9 before I send the data to MySQL table
- is there a function I can use to do this in PHP?

Thanks...

maybe you need striptags (from php)?

--
marius

Free your mind; the rest will follow.