It depends entirely on the application. We don't know what "unsafe" is without knowing the context. If you're talking about shell meta-characters, it depends on which shell you're using (and which shell the user will be using), and should be relatively moot if you use the multiple-argument form of calls like system and exec, which wouldn't do any shell expansion anyway. If you're talking about unsafe text in HTML, we have things like HTML::Entities.

Basically, identify what you're going to be doing with the data, and then figure out how you're going to ensure that this untrusted data is safe.

And no matter how you approach it, don't think of your algorithm as being built to remove bad things. Build it to permit safe things. If this means doing a tr/a-zA-Z0-9_-//cd, then that's what you have to do.

In reply to Re: Untainting safely. (b0iler proofing?) by Fastolfe
in thread Untainting safely. (b0iler proofing?) by BrowserUk

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.