PHP Filtering: Validation, Sanitizing and Flags

This is an old post!

This post is over 2 years old. Solutions referenced in this article may no longer be valid. Please consider this when utilizing any information referenced here.

PHP’s filter functions are really, really great. I’ve started using them almost any time I need to get input from a user and, personally, I don’t think you should use the old $_GET, $_POST unless you know what you are doing and there is some specific thing you’re trying to accomplish that you can’t with filter. Filter forces you to think carefully about what inputs your script takes and what format it takes them in.

But there are also some behaviors of filter that can bite you in the rear if you aren’t really careful. One of these is knowing which flags you need to pass and what the difference between validation and sanitizing, when is the right time to  use each, and what flags to use. I ran into a good example of this today where I messed it up.

I had configured filter_input_array to pull in a variable as FILTER_VALIDATE_FLOAT, probably because I wasn’t thinking like a user and instead was thinking like a developer. I’m the type of person that, when a form wants to know my phone number, I only enter 10 digits without parentheses or dashes. But users are different. They like friendly things. In this case, the user was entering “16,473.54” and the like into that box.

Now, I can look at that and say, “yeah, that’s a float” (actually, it’s currency). It should be considered a valid value. But FILTER_VALIDATE_FLOAT will throw this out because it has a comma in it, unless you pass FILTER_FLAG_ALLOW_THOUSAND. Then, and only then, does it return the above as a valid value (in this case “16473.54”).

But I looked at the code again. In this case, the value doesn’t need to be there except in a specific case, which I handled in error checking in the code, so I switched it to a Sanitize value instead. It’s probably a good idea to only use  FILTER_VALIDATE_* functions when your user has to give you a valid value and your script would fail if that wasn’t the case. If a validation returns false, you should fail the process and return a (nice) error message to the user. Sanitize functions allow you to accept a little wider range of data and still return a valid value from it. The docs have a great example of this involving email addresses.

So if you’re writing PHP these days, definitely use filter. Just be careful and mind the flags and the difference between validation and sanitizing.

About the Author

Hi, I'm Rob! I'm a blogger and software developer. I wrote petfeedd, dystill, and various other projects and libraries. I'm into electronics, general hackery, and model trains and airplanes. I am based in Huntsville, Alabama, USA.

About Me · Contact Me · Don't Hire Isaiah Armstrong

Did this article help you out?

I don't earn any money from this site.

I run no ads, sell no products and participate in no affiliate programs. I do not accept gifts in exchange for articles, guest articles or link exchanges. I don't track you or sell your data. The only third-party Javascript on this website is Google Analytics.

In general I run this site very much like a 1990s homepage or early 2000s personal blog, meaning that I do this solely because it's fun! I enjoy writing and sharing what I learn.

If you found this article helpful and want to show your appreciation, a tip or donation would be very welcome. Feel free to choose from the options below.

Comments (0)

Interested in why you can't leave comments on my blog? Read the article about why comments are uniquely terrible and need to die. If you are still interested in commenting on this article, feel free to reach out to me directly and/or share it on social media.

Contact Me
Share It

Interested in reading more?

PHP

Using Phinx Programmatically

Phinx is a really cool database migration package that allows you to write changes to your database as code. It keeps track of which changes have been applied and allows you the option of rolling back if you hit an issue. All the documentation on Phinx describes a typical setup where you would run the phinx command to do your migrations. And that is all fine and good in most projects. But what happens if you are integrating Phinx into an existing project that already has a lot of the usual scaffolding in place?
Read More
PHP

Monitoring for Filesystem Changes using PHP and Laravel

Let’s say you have a Laravel application that does some data processing, and you want to monitor a directory for incoming changes, that you can then process using queued jobs. There are a couple of ways you could do something like this. You could scan those directories on a schedule using a cronjob. It’s doable. But what happens if you want to monitor a few thousand directories for changes? You can use tools like incron. Also doable, but another dependency. But what if I told you you could do it all with PHP. And within Laravel, no less?
Read More
Release Announcements

New Open Source Code

Launched two new pieces of open source code in the last couple of months. PlayerControls PlayerControls is a macOS Cocoa framework that creates a View containing playback controls for media like videos or sounds. It is written in pure Swift 4 and has no dependencies. SearchParser SearchParser is a parser that converts a freeform query into an intermediate object, that can then be converted to query many backends (SQL, ElasticSearch, etc). It includes translators for SQL (using PDO) and Laravel Eloquent ORM. It supports a faceted language search as commonly found on many sites across the web. It is written in modern PHP. Both are licensed under the MIT license. Go check them out on Github.
Read More