[RESOLVED] Allowing foreign chars input (strip out anything not wanted)

[vaaaska]

This is a little puzzling...I'm trying to allow users to input their name in any language. I want to exclude anything that isn't a letter, a number or the chars ., _, or -.

Using the locale doesn't work [:alnum:] as the system has one language...utf-8. As the default it's stripping out even anything accented.

mb_eregi_replace() is allowing chars that shouldn't be allowed: ^ & *...etc.

Perhaps, I'm not thinking backwards well enought today, but aside from doing a rather odd $search and $replace using "array('@', '$',...you get the idea) I can't see a simple way of pulling this off?

Just looking for a direction on this...if there is one.

Thanks... 😉

[Roger_Ramjet]

Coming to a server near you, PHP 6 And The Unicode Functions.

Until then, the only way I can think of, because setlocale() will screw you up, is to check if the ASCII value if the characters fall within the ranges that you want to allow [48-57][64-90][97-122][138][140][142][154][156][158][159][192-214][216-246][248-255]
plus the @ and -

It is probably more efficient to compare against the excluded values as there are fewer of them.

I'll leave converting char to ascii and building the comparison function to you as I can do this in VB but have not tried to in PHP.

[vaaaska]

Thanks Roger...you're giving me a sanity check on this...and this is good info too.

😉