Re: [PHP] parsing text for special characters

Adam Williams wrote:
I've got an html form, and I have PHP parse the message variables for
special characters so when I concatenate all off the message variables
together, if a person has put in a ' " or other special character, it

exactly how are ' and " special inside the body of an email message?

won't break it when it used in mail($to, "MMH Suggestion", "$message",
"$headers"); below is my snippet of code, but is there a better way to
parse the text for special characters. what about if I were to have the

it's not 'parsing' - it's 'escaping', and how you escape depends on the context
in which the string is going to be used.

$message inserted into a mysql field? how would I need to handle
special characters that way?

mysql_real_escape_string()


$need_message = $_POST['need_message'];

function flash_encode($need_message)
{
$string = rawurlencode(utf8_encode($need_message));

$string = str_replace("%C2%96", "-", $need_message);
$string = str_replace("%C2%91", "%27", $need_message);
$string = str_replace("%C2%92", "%27", $need_message);
$string = str_replace("%C2%82", "%27", $need_message);
$string = str_replace("%C2%93", "%22", $need_message);
$string = str_replace("%C2%94", "%22", $need_message);
$string = str_replace("%C2%84", "%22", $need_message);
$string = str_replace("%C2%8B", "%C2%AB", $need_message);
$string = str_replace("%C2%9B", "%C2%BB", $need_message);

return $need_message;
}

where is this function used and why would you 'flash encode' a string
destined for the body of an email?


//and then there are $topic_message, $fee_message, etc and they all get
concatenated with
$message .= needs_message;

this line is wrong, unless 'needs_message' is actually a constant.

$message .= $topics_message;
$message .= $fee message;

this line is a parse error. have you actually tried to run your code?


//emails the $message
mail($to, "MMH Suggestion", "$message", "$headers");

^-- why are these variables inside quotes?


.

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