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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-01T14:36:06+00:00

I have simple question. User supplies URL to my PHP script where I fetch

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I have simple question. User supplies URL to my PHP script where I fetch the page from the URL and parse it and show some snippet to user. Now I want to sanitize or better escape the URL so it is safe for me to fetch it by using file_get_contents().

My simplified code looks like this:

$url = $_POST['url'];
$html = file_get_contents($url);

First thing what came to my mind is to use regex for catching evil URL, but I don’t think it is efficient and better would be escape the whole URL. But what PHP function can I use for escaping URL for use in file_get_contents() function ?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    You could simply require the url to start with http:// or https://.

    Luckily PHP is smart enough not to follow redirects to a file:// url.
    However, it does follow redirects to ftp:// urls, so you better make sure your server cannot access any internal ftp servers without authentication.

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