You can generally store any arbitrary binary data you want in a DB (but that of course depends ;-) Anyway to ensure the insert does not fail you need to quote some chars. With Perl and DBI all you actually need to do is is use placeholders ie:

my $data = "some 'arbitrary' data....."; my $more_data = "\007\000\007"; $sth = $dbh->prepare( 'INSERT INTO table (col1, col2) VALUES (?,?)' ); $sth->execute( $data, $more_data);

The next it depends comes from what you plan on doing with the data when you RETRIEVE it from the DB..... If you are going to do open $data; eval $data; system $data; etc then you do need to untaint it. However whether you untaint it on DB insertion or not I would personally still redo the untaint prior to use, that way if someone corrupts your DB data it will not cause you undue grief.

cheers

tachyon


In reply to Re: Common untainting methods? by tachyon
in thread Common untainting methods? by Wally Hartshorn

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.