Trimming Strings etc

SFADuncan · 19th July 2003, 06:09 PM

Beginning to tidy up some of my PHP and decided to start using AddSlashes, StripSlashes and Trim etc on certain strings for a very simple comment and feedback system I've written. But I have found that for some reason I don't need them - it seems the processes are already happening. Is this the way MySQL is already set up or something?

This is a problem, because on my main feedback form I want carriage returns to be acknowledge when returning them - which they are in the MySQL database, but not when returning the string to my web page.

Simon

UH-Matt · 19th July 2003, 07:32 PM

This MIGHT be because PHP is compiled with "--enable-magic-quotes".

I believe you can turn off magic-quotes in your .htaccess file.

I am not a scripter so could be wrong

Bman · 20th July 2003, 08:47 AM

Yes, Matt's right. Magic quotes are probably responsible for the behavior you're seeing with slashes. From the documentation:

Quote:

magic_quotes_gpc boolean

Sets the magic_quotes state for GPC (Get/Post/Cookie) operations. When magic_quotes are on, all ' (single-quote), " (double quote), \ (backslash) and NUL's are escaped with a backslash automatically.

The carriage returns are another matter, though. If they're in your database but not showing up on your page, have you made sure that you're converting them to HTML before displaying? You need a <br /> tag to display a newline, and there is no automatic conversion for that. Magic quotes only handles the quotes and slashes, and only works on data coming in, not going out.

You can call nl2br() to take care of newline->br tag conversion.

Euge · 20th July 2003, 01:19 PM

Here are some functions I use to ensure my addslashes and stripslashes always work based on the apache configuration. This makes your code much more portable.

PHP Code:

  /**

* Used to return escaped text for a Get/Post/Cookie variable

* based on the php modules configuration

*/

function getGpcEscaped($x)

{

        return get_cfg_var(magic_quotes_gpc) ? $x : addslashes($x) ;

}

 
/**

* Used to return unescaped text for a Get/Post/Cookie variable

* based on the php modules configuration

*/

function getGpcUnescaped($x)

{

        return get_cfg_var(magic_quotes_gpc) ? stripslashes($x) : $x ;

}