Don't think of it as removing the special characters. Think of it as keeping the safe/useful characters. It is a subtle thing but you'll be well served in the future if you keep that attitude. You can spend all day adding more and more special characters or you can just removed everything that you aren't sure is valid. You'll always miss things but it is easier to allow one extra thing you missed than clean up your database or hacked server when you allowed something you shouldn't have.

As an example, to keep only upper case letters and numbers, you might do: $scalar =~ s/[^A-Z0-9]+//g; which removes from the string every character that isn't in the A-Z or 0-9 range.

--
$you = new YOU;
honk() if $you->love(perl)

In reply to Re: removing special characters by extremely
in thread removing special characters by Anonymous Monk

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.