PHP: Invalid character breaks html

Question

how should I clean up a string which contains invalid characters and would break html after printing it in textarea?

PHP's ord() returns 0 for the said character, but I suspect it's not null, which I don't think it matters anyway.

When string is displayed in textarea all text after the invalid character would disappear as well as all html elements after the textarea.

I tried with htmlentities, htmlspecialchars, mb_convert_encoding, iconv('UTF-8', 'UTF-8//IGNORE', $str), but neither of them worked.

filter_var() isn't introduced yet in 5.1.2 which we are using.

echo and var_dump print the character as �

We ended up using multibyte regular expression function which resolved the issue. — Mitja
– Mitja, Commented Jun 28, 2009 at 10:09

score 2 · Accepted Answer · 2009-03-10 18:33:41Z

2

Try filter_var($string, FILTER_SANITIZE_STRING, FILTER_FLAG_STRIP_LOW).

Edit: Since 5.1.2 doesn't have filter_var, you could try this (which is almost the same thing):

preg_replace('/\p{Cc}/u', '', $string);

edited Mar 10, 2009 at 18:33

answered Mar 10, 2009 at 14:56

user42092

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2 Comments

Mitja Over a year ago

Thanks, but we are using 5.1.2 which doesn't feature filter_var() yet.

user42092 Over a year ago

I think they have a PECL version of the filter extension for 5.1, but I've added another answer to the post anyway...

meouw · Accepted Answer · 2009-03-10 16:26:22Z

1

I have used this regular expression before when htmlentities, htmlspecialchars, mb_convert_encoding, iconv('UTF-8', 'UTF-8//IGNORE', $str) didn't work. It strips out the control characters

$str = preg_replace( '/[\x00-\x08\x0B-\x0C\x0E-\x1F\x7F-\x9F]/', '', $str );

answered Mar 10, 2009 at 16:26

meouw

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Comments

KOGI · Accepted Answer · 2009-03-30 22:08:57Z

0

Possibly:

$str = trim($str, chr(0));

??

answered Mar 30, 2009 at 22:08

KOGI

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