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PHP

Explanation on how to sanitize user inputs in PHP to protect against SQL injections?

Can someone explain to me the process for sanitizing a user input. I've found code online for sanitizing inputs, but if someone could explain how each part works that would be appreciated. I'm trying to develop a website for many people and want to understand how to secure the PHP form processing against SQL injections. If not, do you know any websites with a good explanation? Thank you.

3 Answers

A quick google returns this tutorial getting clean with PHP by nettuts about data sanitation using PHP.

It's a really good idea to make sure you're using the mysqli interface: http://devzone.zend.com/239/ext-mysqli-part-i_overview-and-prepared-statements/. Using prepared statements is by far the cleanest way to avoid SQL injection.

Randy Hoyt
Randy Hoyt
Treehouse Guest Teacher

Yes, prepared statements are the way to go. I'll be covering how to work with them using PDO in future tutorials.

Randy Hoyt
STAFF
Randy Hoyt
Treehouse Guest Teacher

That post from James Barnett is a good one. I'm currently working on a set of tutorials for working with PHP and MySQL together using the PHP Data Objects (PDO) in PHP 5.