How to I remove special characters and spaces on a textfield using PHP

Question

I need to remove all special characters and spaces on a textfield for a form I\'m building. How do I accomplish this in PHP.

Answer 1

This really depends, I assume you are working with $_POST[] data and wish to sanitize those inputs? If so I would definitely do something like:

$var = preg_replace("/[^A-Za-z0-9]/", "", $var);

That will strip out everything other than alpha/num, you can adjust the regex to include other characters if you wish. Some great examples of commonly used regular expressions can be found at: The RegEx Library

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