Miscellaneous Monks,

I have your classic MySQL DB of user-profile info and a web-based html form for input. In my Perl middleware, I'm trying to use HTML::Entities to encode any and all non-alphanumeric characters plus all non-English characters in the user input before building the SQL.

Works OK, except for the "any and all non-alphanumeric characters plus all non-English characters" part. Tried the deault

$encoded_input = encode_entities($input
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but, as it says in the documentation

This routine replaces unsafe characters in $string with their entity representation. .... The default set of characters to encode are control chars, high-bit chars, and the <, &, >, ' and " characters.

and that doesn't seem to include a whole bunch of non-alphnum characters like :, ;, , , ^, (, ) and a few more.

So I read:

A second argument can be given to specify which characters to consider unsafe (i.e., which to escape). ... this, for example, would encode just the <, &, >, and " characters:

$encoded = encode_entities($input, '<>&"');
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OK, but I don't want to have to generate a list of every non-English character plus all the non-aplhanumerics - I might as well make my own regex if I have to do that.

So next I tried this, from the example:

encode_entities($string, "\200-\377");
[download]

But that leave a whole bunch of non-alphanumeric chars as well. So, what the heck, just enlarge the range, right?

encode_entities($a, "\1-\500");
[download]

converts every single character, alphanumeric and all. But maybe I'm getting closer...

Will appreciate pointers to get me there.

Thanks.

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In reply to HTML::Entities - encode all non-alphanumeric and foreign chars? by punch_card_don

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