Tag Archives: World Wide Web

How to Sanitize User Input in PHP?

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It’s a question almost every PHP developer asks yourself. By me the most simple way to sanitize the user input is to save everything in the database with no loosing of tags or whatever HTML markup and than on displaying this on the client side to strip_tags if needed.

In example when saving a HTML formatted text you can use simply the htmlspecialchars method

$description = htmlspecialchars($_POST['description']);

Than you can be sure everything’s in the database, but it’s not actually HTML. Thus you don’t have any tags at all in the database field.

When you show this in the client side and you’d like to strip some tags, i.e. to keep only the <a> tag you can do this:

echo strip_tags(htmlspecialchars_decode($description), '<a>');

That’s the most simple way to keep everything as the original source. By me it’s better to keep whatever HTML markup there is on the input.

Custom Routes with Zend_Controller_Router_Route

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Rewrite The Url?

Actually this is really a common task to do. You’ve to rewrite the url to be more “user friendly”. To be more clear I’ll give you an example. Let’s imagine you have a index controller and an index action. Thus if you have to load an Id from the database at least with the build in Zend Framework capabilities, you’ve to use this link:

www.example.com/index/index/id/33949

This is not good. It’s really bad. It will be great if you can use something like this:

www.example.com/33949

The solution in Zend Framework is called Zend_Controller_Router_Route. In a short snippet this will look like so:

$frontController->addRoute("my-route", new Zend_Controller_Router_Route("/:id",
    array("controller" => "index", "action" => "index", 'id' => 1),
    array('id' => '\d+')));

Here as you can see id is set to be 1. But don’t worry that’s not a hard code. The real work is done by the last parameter where the id is matched against a number value. Thus www.example.com/3 will be OK, but www.example.com/3a won’t.

Important Note

Don’t forget to add this rewrite rule in the .htaccess file.

Zend_Http_Client and Case Sensitivity

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Recently I posted about Zend_Http_Client and the ability to check a request HEAD or GET. It is, as everything in Zend Framework, extremely easy to adopt and use, but today I experienced some “strnage” problems!

As I wrote some lines of code,

<?php
....
$client = new Zend_Http_Client('uri_path');
$request = $client->request('head');
...
?>

so far so good, everything worked just perfect until I deployed the “working” code on the production server. Than odd enough some requests just crashed. Not all – just some of them.

Another strange thing was that no exception was thrown.

Maybe using more my intuition instead of my brain I just tried to request the head using capital letter – HEAD. And as everything was strange enough, yet again this solution happened to be working! That solved my problem.

<?php
....
$client = new Zend_Http_Client('uri_path');
$request = $client->request('HEAD');
...
?>

Vendor Prefixes in CSS

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Vendor Prefixes vs CSS3

Either are bad, because vendor prefixes work on specific browsers, while CSS3 is not implemented fully by those browsers. When talking about vendor prefixes in CSS, let me tell you in breve, what’s this. If you’d like to make rounded corner under Mozilla Firefox, you usually use a background image, but there’s another way to do it – with Mozilla specific CSS:

-moz-border-radius: 5px;

That’s bad because it works only on Mozilla based browsers, although there’s a webkit based similar syntax:

-webkit-border-radius: 5px;

Even after that our “favorite” browser MSIE until version 9 is not displaying any rounded corners.

In other hand CSS3 gives us the possibility to write the simple:

border-radius:5px;

which is not implemented in many currently used browsers, but it may be used for progressive enhancements.

In Breve …

Everybody’s talking about vendor prefixes after the famous post of PPK, but there are both opinions – pros and cons. However it’s good to use it, but very carefully, and think about what CSS3 may give you!

Send Mail with Zend Framework

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Simple, but Doesn’t Work!

It may sound strange, because all this is quite well documented in the Zend Framework documentation. Indeed it’s very very simple and all is done only by few lines of code.

$mail = new Zend_Mail();
$mail->setFrom('sender@example.com');
$mail->setBodyHtml('some message - it may be html formatted text');
$mail->addTo('recipient@example.com', 'recipient');
$mail->setSubject('subject');
$mail->send();

Even it look simple though, it may not work on your localhost while you’re trying to make it work! Because you’ve to have sendmail setup. And in Zend Framework sendmail is the default transport protocol for sending mails.

What You Have to Do to Make it Work?

Actually you’ve simply to add a transport protocol, just like that:

$tr = new Zend_Mail_Transport_Smtp('smtp.example.com',
                    array('auth' => 'login',
                             'username' => 'username',
                             'password' => 'password'));
Zend_Mail::setDefaultTransport($tr);

Where Did I Get These?

Well look at your favorite mail account you probably use every day. It may be hosted in GMail or wherever, but there are some configurations you have to port under Zend’s code and everything will be just fine until you develop the app!