Book Image

PHP 7 Programming Cookbook

By : Doug Bierer
Book Image

PHP 7 Programming Cookbook

By: Doug Bierer

Overview of this book

PHP 7 comes with a myriad of new features and great tools to optimize your code and make your code perform faster than in previous versions. Most importantly, it allows you to maintain high traffic on your websites with low-cost hardware and servers through a multithreading web server. This book demonstrates intermediate to advanced PHP techniques with a focus on PHP 7. Each recipe is designed to solve practical, real-world problems faced by PHP developers like yourself every day. We also cover new ways of writing PHP code made possible only in version 7. In addition, we discuss backward-compatibility breaks and give you plenty of guidance on when and where PHP 5 code needs to be changed to produce the correct results when running under PHP 7. This book also incorporates the latest PHP 7.x features. By the end of the book, you will be equipped with the tools and skills required to deliver efficient applications for your websites and enterprises.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
PHP 7 Programming Cookbook
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Filtering $_POST data


The process of filtering data can encompass any or all of the following:

  • Removing unwanted characters (that is, removing <script> tags)

  • Performing transformations on the data (that is, converting a quote to &quot;)

  • Encrypting or decrypting the data

Encryption is covered in the last recipe of this chapter. Otherwise, we will present a basic mechanism that can be used to filter $_POST data arriving following form submission.

How to do it...

  1. First of all, you need to have an awareness of the data that will be present in $_POST. Also, perhaps more importantly, you will need to be aware of the restrictions imposed by the database table in which the form data will presumably be stored. As an example, have a look at the database structure for the prospects table:

    COLUMN          TYPE              NULL   DEFAULT
    first_name      varchar(128)      No     None     NULL
    last_name       varchar(128)      No     None     NULL
    address         varchar(256)      Yes    None     NULL...