CODEWITHSUNDEEP
php
motleycrue
motleycrue

Reputation: 81

Strip any unknown characters from string php

I have a restful web service, that gets input string, sanitizes it and saves it to MySQL database.

My workflow looks like this: I get string, I trim it. Then I remove any non alphanumeric characters, leaving underscore. And then I replace underscore with space. And then I save it to database.

    $trimmedName = trim($name);
    $replacedName = preg_replace("/[^0-9a-zA-Z_]/", "", $trimmedName);
    $sanitizedName = trim(str_replace("_", " ", $replacedName));

Problem is, that this works fine 99% of time. But sometimes, I see in database that there is a square symbol. I dont have photo of that, but you get the idea. Im not sure what it is and why my preg_replace does not strip it out. I think someone tries to take advantage of this bug, so I would like to know what is wrong with my regex, why it leaves some unknown characters.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 100

Answers (1)

Oluwaseye
Oluwaseye

Reputation: 695

This is probably as a result of the characters you are saving. The names have some accent on some letters. This means you check your character encoding and set it to UTF-8 in the code header.

PHP

header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8');

Also make sure your database table's character set is UTF-8

You can update the table MySQL

ALTER TABLE tbl_name CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8;

Upvotes: 1

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