Sanitizing data

…In this movie, we'll talk about how to…sanitize the data that comes into your PHP code.…Sanitizing data is the most important step you…can take towards a more secure web server.…And that's because the easiest hacks to execute and therefore…the most common attacks, all involve passing in carefully constructed data.…Validating our data only makes sure that the data appears…to be correct, but that data can still be harmful.…And many parts of our application, respond to special strings in powerful ways.…From the database to HTML.…

It's hard to write code that can detect a hack that's embedded in a string.…So instead of detecting it, we take a different approach.…We process the data in order to neutralize the danger.…To render it harmless.…And this process is called sanitizing or filtering.…How we sanitize the data depends on how we plan to use it.…For putting the data into the database, then…we need to sanitize it for the database.…If we're going to output that string to the browser…page, then we need to sanitize it for HTML.…