solutions to disadvantages when register_globals is off

Everyone seems to recommend turning off register_globals, but accessing them through $HTTP_POST_VARS["var_name"], gets tedious. I haven't found a better solution (not to say there isn't one) than this small snippet. The idea is to turn off "register_globals", as I believe is heavily recommended by the PHP team, and declare what variables you are expecting on a per script basis. Magic-quotes would also be off. Hopefully this makes all external variables safe. I was hoping some experienced users would cast their eye over this and suggest any improvements, and comment if it is worth doing at all define("ALLOWABLE_HTML_TAGS", "<B><H1>"); function use_ext_var($var_name, $var_location) { global $$var_name, $$var_location; $$var_name = ${$var_location}[$var_name]; $$var_name = stripslashes($$var_name); $$var_name = strip_tags($$var_name, ALLOWABLE_HTML_TAGS); } use_ext_var("sample_var", "HTTP_GET_VARS"); print $sample_var; How are other people handling this, or are most of you 'lazy' and just use globals :) Regards D Robinson