As part of a online forum I'm setting up I need to display user submitted content, which is stored in a database and then displayed.

Because the site uses cookies for authentification, and as a general preventative measure I wish to strip out dangerous tags, javascript, images etc.

I think that I would be safe just leaving a minimal subset of HTML, such as the following tags P, B, I, A (with only a subset of attributes, HREF and TITLE for example).

I realise that a regular expression approach is unlikely to be workable, so my two choices seem to be HTML::Sanitizer and HTML::Scrubber. Both of these will do the job, without too much effort. (I'm still suprised this isn't done here on the home nodes, maybe its a hard thing to do efficiently? Either that or its not yet been considered important enough)

As they do a real parse of the HTML they rely upon the various parsing modules, HTML::Tree and HTML::Parser respectively.

Is there another approach I'm missing, with less dependencies? Or a simpler system I could use instead?

Whilst I can use either of the two packages above I'm keen on using something that's less hungry - so that I can keep it upto date on my Debian Stable webhost.

Steve
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steve.org.uk

In reply to Sanitizing HTML by skx

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


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