Making entered data 'safe'

[Tim_Christopher]

Can some one please recommend a good way to make data, entered by the user, for use in a database or being echo'd back to the screen 'safe'.

So far I'm thinking on doing something around htmlspecialchars, get_html_translation_table, stripslashes etc... I don't know if there's anyway you could trick it if you did that, but surely this is a very common problem so some guru must have a 1st class solution to share... I hope 0:-)

[bastien]

depends on what kind of data...can check for numerical data with [man]is_numeric/man

can use [man]regex[/man] for patterns

can use [man]replace/man to replace certain things, like the "<" in html tags with "[" and so on...