Compression

Compression is a light weight class that will load a CSS stylesheet, bind and translate given variables, compress and remove white space and cache the output for future use.

View More

Stripping HTML automatically from your data

Monday, July 20th 2009, 11:38pm
Topics: Tutorials, CakePHP
Tags: Model, Data, Sanitize, Clean, Automatically, beforeSave, Strip, HTML
Comments: 3
Permalink - Tinylink

About a week ago I talked about automatically sanitizing your data before its saved. Now I want to talk about automatically stripping HTML from your data before its saved, which is good practice. Personally, I hate saving any type of HTML to a database, thats why I prefer a BB code type system for this website. To strip all tags from your data, add this method to your AppModel.

/**
 * Strip all html tags from an array
 * @param array $data
 * @return array
 */
function cleanHtml($data) {
	if (is_array($data)) {
		foreach ($data as $key => $var) {
			$data[$key] = $this->cleanHtml($var);
		}
	} else {
		$data = Sanitize::html($data, true);
	}
	
	return $data;
}


Pretty simple right? The next and final step is to add it to your AppModel's beforeSave(). In the next example, I will use the code snippet from my previous related article. Once you have done this your are finished, now go give it a test drive.

function beforeSave() {
	if (!empty($this->data) && $this->cleanData === true) {
		$connection = (!empty($this->useDbConfig)) ? $this->useDbConfig : 'default';
		
		$this->data = Sanitize::clean($this->data, array('connection' => $connection, 'escape' => false));
		$this->data = $this->cleanHtml($this->data);
	}
	
	return true;
}
Related Entries:

3 Comments

10 / 2 = ?
Allowed: [code] [b] [i] [u]
  • thedilab
    the-di-lab.com
    Jul 31st 2009, 09:55
    1 happend to see you website by chance,
    very active site and useful posting.
    This is my site www.the-di-lab.com anyways,
    hope to see you there and communicate all thoughts about Jquery and Cakephp.

    Regards.

    thedilab
  • Lucas Costa
    Jun 1st 2010, 12:49
    2 Miles, thanks for this code.

    I've updated the line $data = Sanitize::html($data, true); to if(!is_null($data)) $data = Sanitize::html($data, true);.

    Otherwise null data gets converted to string on sanitization and goes to the db as ''.

    Best regards
  • hendra
    Jun 27th 2011, 20:54
    3 help me

    error :
    Undefined property: AppModel::$cleanData

    how do i do ?