[RESOLVED] Nasty data cleaner help?

[skip]

Hi Guys,

I am looking for a function to clear out nasty data during a datafeed import.

I would like to wrap this in a function so it's simple to use and I want it to strip everything out apart from letters numbers spaces and full stops.

I asume this can be done with ereg or preg_replace but I don't know where to start.

Thanks in advance.

[NogDog]

You could do something like:

$output = preg_replace('/[^a-z0-9 .]/i', '', $input);

[skip]

perfect thank you 🙂

[skip]

Oooooh - I just thought what if I have & or alike in the data will I end up with amp?

how would I handle this and others ?

Thanks

[NogDog]

The best answer will depend on the best understanding of the source of the data, what it contains, and what really needs to be screened out of it. Maybe you just need to do something like:

echo htmlspecialchars(strip_tags($text));