note 97991 deleted from function.htmlspecialchars by cmb

Note Submitter: nessthehero at gmail dot com ---- Here's a simple function I wrote for parsing form data. It checks if it's an array and it is recursive (it calls itself). It also decodes things that have already been encoded so it doesn't change &amp; to &amp;amp; [In this version,] I found it easier to use a regular expression to check and see if any previously encoded data exists, then decode it repeatedly until there is none left, then re-encode it. <?php function formspecialchars($var) { $pattern = '/&(#)?[a-zA-Z0-9]{0,};/'; if (is_array($var)) { // If variable is an array $out = array(); // Set output as an array foreach ($var as $key => $v) { $out[$key] = formspecialchars($v); // Run formspecialchars on every element of the array and return the result. Also maintains the keys. } } else { $out = $var; while (preg_match($pattern,$out) > 0) { $out = htmlspecialchars_decode($out,ENT_QUOTES); } $out = htmlspecialchars(stripslashes(trim($out)), ENT_QUOTES,'UTF-8',true); // Trim the variable, strip all slashes, and encode it } return $out; } ?>