A fine distinction should be made between validating the input and untainting it.

Untaininting should be more concerned with security of your web-site (to make sure, the user does not slip in some executable code or other bad things), whereas validating has more to do with obtaining valid data from the user.

It seems you are more concerned with validating here and in order to do that you need to make a model of the data you are expecting and check the input against that model (ask yourself: what is a valid date, name, password, ...).

Whether you do this checking through multiple if tests and regexes or any of the other suggested methods is less important than finding/setting the rules which define valid input.

CountZero

"If you have four groups working on a compiler, you'll get a 4-pass compiler." - Conway's Law

---

---

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! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

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:
	&		&
	<		&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.