Making text safe...

olliebrooke

Hi,
I have searched for a solution to this problem but have been unable to find one.
I am writing a forum and want to make the text input safe so I am using the following code to remove most non-kosher characters;
$new_string = preg_replace("/[^a-zA-Z0-9? ]/", "", $text);

The problem is that is it also removing new lines so that all the text appears as thought ENTER had never been pressed when inputting the text. What is the character or code I should use so as new lines aren't removed?
Thanks in advance!
Ollie

NogDog

'\n'

olliebrooke

NogDog wrote:
'\n'

Thanks for the quick reply but it didn't work. Do i need to put in \n or '\n' in that string of allowed characters? Is there a better way of filtering input perhaps?

NogDog

You should be able to add the \n (no quotes) within your character class. However, remember that newlines are treated as spaces in HTML output (unless within a <pre> element or other element that has been styled as "white-space:pre". So, when you output it to the browser, you may need to use [man]nl2br/man or your own custom function to deal with the newlines so that they display as desired.

As to a better way to to it, the question might be: do you need to filter out certain characters from the input, or just control how they are output, either by using [man]strip_tags/man, [man]htmlspecialchars/man or [man]htmlentities/man?

olliebrooke

Using HTML Entities et is probably a better way of doing it, thanks very much for the help!