Feature Request

PHP3 has some really handy functions for dealing with strings, such as nl2br, htmlspecialchars, addslashes, chop, etc. Basically, things that can be accomplished with regular expressions, but are far more convenient and easy to use. In a slightly different vein, it would be nice if there were some functions for dealing with form validation. First and foremost, this is important for security reasons. As far as I can tell, PHP doesn't have anything like Perl's -T option, and I'm a little concerned about what's coming down the pipe. Secondly, it would be nice to know if you're getting what you asked for. The functions would do things like search a string for a valid email address, valid phone number, or a zip/country code -- stripping out any potentially dangerous (or incorrect) characters. Ideally, this would work like: <form action="mail.phtml" method="post"> <input type="text" name="email_addr"> <input type="text" name="phone_num"> <input type="zip" name="zip_code"> </form> ------ $cleanEmail = get_email($email_addr); $cleanPhone = get_phone($phone_num); $cleanZip = get_uszip($zip_code); A regex would be applied to find what you're looking for, and failing that, the function would return a false. Making this type of stuff into neat little functions makes it more accessible to newbies, and more elegant for normal users. It's sort of the "PHP way". :) I'd do this myself, but I'm not fluent in C. - Scott