Edit report at https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=47494&edit=1
ID: 47494
Updated by: rasmus@php.net
Reported by: philipp dot feigl at gmail dot com
Summary: htmlspecialchars does not throw E_WARNING on
multibyte problems
Status: Not a bug
Type: Feature/Change Request
Package: Strings related
Operating System: CentOS5
PHP Version: 5.2.8
Block user comment: N
Private report: N
New Comment:
Also note that many, if not most, apps use this as their only validity filter and
if you output invalid UTF-8, for example, it can lead to security problems like
the well-known IE 0xE0 XSS exploit. So at some point along the line you have to
do a multi-byte check and it may as well be here since we need to do it anyway.
Previous Comments:
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[2012-09-06 15:29:07] rasmus@php.net
You assume ASCII7 compatibility for all encodings which is a bad assumption.
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[2012-09-06 11:39:19] lzsiga at freemail dot c3 dot hu
Imho htmlspecialchars should not check for multi-byte validity at all, because it only deals with a
few characters that are all in ASCII7, so it could safely ignore every byte between 0x80 and 0xFF.
The third parameter could be simply ignored (as if it were 'ISO-8859-1')
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[2012-08-30 19:21:49] nikic@php.net
@the disappointed user: PHP 5.4 no longer throws said warning (it was just confusing). Instead there
are several new options for dealing with incorrect encoding. Of particular interest is
ENT_SUBSTITUTE, which will replace invalid code unit sequences with the Unicode Replacement
Character (instead of returning a rather unhelpful empty string). This way you can easily spot where
the string is incorrectly encoded. Furthermore this option has the additional advantage of being
more graceful (it just removed individual incorrectly encoded bytes, not the whole string).
Hope this helps you. More info in the docs: http://de2.php.net/htmlspecialchars
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[2012-08-30 19:01:22] another_disappointed_php_programmer at exam
This is very sad.
This is a bug, and it's sad that PHP core developers said that it's a feature and it
won't be fixed. I'm disappointed.
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[2012-07-01 15:34:03] rasmus@php.net
This really isn't a bug. I do agree that the approach isn't ideal, but we
shouldn't throw warnings on bad input here because htmlspecialchars() is
explicitly designed to clean up bad input and it is run directly on user data
most of the time. In order for someone to avoid this warning they would need to
first call something like iconv('utf-8','utf-8') to clean up the input data and
that doesn't make much sense since htmlspecialchars() essentially does that
already. But, in order to help debugging there should be some way to see why an
htmlspecialchars() call failed so a last_error() function similar to how it is
handled for json decoding would make sense.
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