note 118874 added to function.htmlspecialchars

At least two years ago an important PHP application I wrote (an order processing system) stopped working in certain cases, with text being erased, requiring difficult manual intervention. As described in other comments here, the problem was that code like "$Str=htmlspecialchars($Str)" had stopped working reliably. I've found that Dave's solution presented here did not work for me in every case. I finally solved this problem by replacing all such htmlspecialchars calls with the following function, which should work for every character encoding: function SafeStr($Str) // For showing user input on page in HTML { return str_replace(array('&','<','>','"','\''), array('&amp;','&lt;','&gt;','&quot;','&apos;'), $Str); } // SafeStr ---- Server IP: 72.52.91.14 Probable Submitter: 67.253.38.31 ---- Manual Page -- http://php.net/manual/en/function.htmlspecialchars.php Edit -- https://master.php.net/note/edit/118874 Del: integrated -- https://master.php.net/note/delete/118874/integrated Del: useless -- https://master.php.net/note/delete/118874/useless Del: bad code -- https://master.php.net/note/delete/118874/bad+code Del: spam -- https://master.php.net/note/delete/118874/spam Del: non-english -- https://master.php.net/note/delete/118874/non-english Del: in docs -- https://master.php.net/note/delete/118874/in+docs Del: other reasons-- https://master.php.net/note/delete/118874 Reject -- https://master.php.net/note/reject/118874 Search -- https://master.php.net/manage/user-notes.php